Latino Healthcare Under Attack: Lawmakers Are Reversing 14 Years of Progress

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Report finds that the Trump administration is presiding over history’s largest health coverage losses

WASHINGTON — A new report from UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights and advocacy organization, finds that more than 4 million Latinos are among the roughly 14 million Americans projected to lose health coverage over 10 years due to federal cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Latinos loom especially large among those projected to lose coverage. The estimated share of newly uninsured who are Latino is 58% in Florida, 56% in New Mexico, 53% in California, 48% in Texas and 45% in Arizona.

According to recent projections from non-partisan experts at the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), the number of uninsured Americans is projected to grow by 8.7 million people from 2025 to 2028: a 33% increase, more than twice the largest previous rise, which took place in the early 1990s.

The report finds that federal policies are the direct source of these healthcare losses. Congress’s decision to let ACA healthcare tax credits expire in January 2026, raising average health insurance costs by $1,000 a year for more than 20 million Americans, including 6.5 million Latinos who buy their own ACA insurance.

Other policies are scheduled for implementation starting next year. The federal budget approved in 2025 eliminated more than $1 trillion in federal funding for Medicaid and ACA health insurance, the largest dollar cut in history. The legislation will harm Americans from all backgrounds, according to the UnidosUS report, but will hit the Latino community with particular force.

“Unlike major coverage losses of the past, which resulted from recession-driven layoffs and terminations of employer-based coverage, today’s far larger coverage losses are entirely self-inflicted, resulting from policy choices made by Congress and the administration. At a time when families across the country are struggling with rising costs, lawmakers are choosing to worsen healthcare affordability and accessibility, threatening to erase 14 years of hard-won gains under the Affordable Care Act. Lawmakers must reverse course now to protect American healthcare,” said Stan Dorn, director of the Health Policy Project at UnidosUS.

Immigration enforcement compounds the damage. Between 2023 and 2025, the share of immigrant parents reporting their families avoided public programs due to deportation fears nearly doubled, from 11% to 18% — affecting millions of U.S.-citizen children with immigrant parents.

UnidosUS’s report contrasts these losses to the significant healthcare gains that Latinos made between the 2010 enactment of the ACA and 2024, when the proportion of Latinos without health insurance plummeted from 31% to 17%. As a result, nearly 10 million Latinos gained health insurance coverage.

To prevent this unprecedented loss in health insurance for millions of Americans, UnidosUS calls on lawmakers to take immediate action by repealing harmful policies and working with Latino and other communities to build health programs that better serve the needs of the American people.

Ultimately, lawmakers cannot make meaningful improvements to healthcare infrastructure without drastic changes:

  • Health coverage must become significantly more seamless and paperless. Eligibility should be redefined so that people automatically qualify for a minimum level of assistance based on prior-year tax returns or their prior qualification for programs like SNAP, making it unnecessary for many families to provide redundant paperwork showing low income.
  • Improved customer service is key. Medicaid agencies and ACA marketplaces need better resources to run effective websites, call centers and social services offices. And if government agencies do not meet clear performance standards, people harmed by such failures should be able to hold them accountable in court.
  • In states that refuse to expand Medicaid to cover poor adults, ACA coverage should be immediately available.
  • Healthcare must be linguistically accessible and culturally attuned, supported by investments to develop a workforce that can achieve those important goals.

Read the full report here.

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