Exchange Has Missed Latino Enrollees
It's been decades since the advertising industry recognized the need to woo Hispanic consumers. Big companies saw the market potential and sank millions of dollars into ads. The most basic dos and don'ts of marketing to Latinos in the U.S. have been understood for years.
So when officials with Covered California, the state's health insurance exchange, started thinking about how to persuade the state's Latino population to enroll in health plans, they should have had a blueprint of what to do. Instead, they made a series of mistakes. As a result, just 7% of people who enrolled in Covered California health plans through the end of January speak Spanish as their first language -- substantially less than the nearly 30% of Spanish speakers in the state.
On average, Latinos are younger and healthier than the general population. The premiums they will pay if they sign up will help cover the healthcare costs of older, sicker Californians. And that keeps premium costs down for everyone else.
"We don't think we've done a good enough job yet," said Peter Lee, executive director of Covered California. "Relative to our ambitions and our aspirations, we don't stack up well enough yet, and so we're going to be doubling down.”
The state spent almost $5 million on its Spanish ad campaign last year. It plans to spend more than $8 million in the first three months of 2014.
And it will try to avoid the mistakes of its first Spanish-language advertisement. It was criticized due to a major feature of the ad – the law’s rules on pre-existing conditions. That doesn't resonate with Latinos, many of whom have never had insurance before.
Bessie Ramirez of the Los Angeles-based Santiago Solutions Group, a Hispanic market research firm, said another problem is that all the early TV ads ended with a web address for Covered California -- no phone number or physical address. She added that completely misses how Hispanics like to shop, especially for a complicated product like health insurance.
"Hispanics are heavily on the Internet, and they're growing very fast on the Internet, however they're not transacting on the Internet," Ramirez noted. "They transact (in-person).
Perhaps Covered California's biggest mistake was simply translating ads developed in English for a general audience into Spanish.
One ad features a series of people looking directly into the camera saying, in Spanish, "Welcome to a new state of health. Welcome to Covered California."
Ad experts say that was an obvious misstep.
"To say we're in a new state of health for California, it's grammatically correct to translate it literally, but it doesn't have the same nuance or cuteness that it does in English," said Roberto Orci, CEO of Acento Advertising in Santa Monica.
He found one of the state's follow-up ads just boring -- the music, the message and the man in the ad.
"This guy was stiff as a board and ... seco, which in English means dry," he said.
The final deadline to sign up for coverage this year is March 31. It's not clear if Covered California can come up with a more effective marketing campaign before then. – APRIL DEMBOSKY
Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan health policy research and communication organization not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
