Earlier this week, President Obama’s reelection campaign released a batch of new Spanish-language ads touting his health care reforms and his track record on jobs.
Health care is a particularly pressing issue in the Hispanic community. Consider these statistics:
- More than a third of the 4.8 million people without health insurance in 2010 were Hispanic, according to census numbers. That same year, Hispanics represented only 16.3 percent of the total population.
- While Hispanics work in many different enterprises, they are also overrepresented in industries like construction, where there is more potential for injuries and fatalities. In 2010, nearly 20 percent of all work-related deaths occurred in the construction industry, according to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
- In 2011, nearly a third of the people working in the construction and extraction fields were Hispanic, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers.
- More than 60 percent of Hispanic construction workers lacked health insurance in 2010; more than a third of those said they’d never had it, according to the Center for Construction Research and Training. Nearly 60 percent of those uninsured workers had not seen a doctor in more than a year.
- In 2010, Hispanics or Latinos represented 16.8 percent of worker fatalities. They represented 12.5 percent of the labor force that year, according to BLS.
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