From rights to reality: immigrants’ equal access to health care benefits

Abstract

This article has two main objectives. First, it examines how Chile has fulfilled its constitutional obligation to guarantee access to health care for all inhabitants–including foreigners–in a context of significant migratory growth. Second, it evaluates the quality of such access through a case study focused on hospital-based childbirth, a reproductive health service provided exclusively to women and clinically comparable across Chilean and foreign patients. Using administrative records of hospital discharges, we observe that since 2016–when undocumented migrants were legally recognized as individuals without financial means and thus entitled to public health care–the country has successfully expanded tertiary coverage to the undocumented migrant population. Nonetheless, an analysis of childbirth and cesarean delivery reveals systematic differences in the type of care received by Chilean and migrant women, with particularly pronounced disparities affecting Haitian women.