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Nonprofit Adelante Community Development helping entrepreneurs navigate health insurance system

Adelante is working with small business owners and other individuals during open enrollment to ensure Latino employers and employees have access to healthcare.

COMMERCE CITY, Colo. — Every Monday, Adelante Community Development hosts a weekly breakfast covering topics that can often be confusing and complicated to ensure entrepreneurs have access to information. This week, the nonprofit tackled health insurance. 

Nov. 1 marked open enrollment for different Colorado healthcare plans including CHP+, Medicaid and OmniSalud. Monday's event brought together healthcare agents who work for entities and agencies to share what options are available. 

"A lot of our Latino entrepreneurs do not have the right access," Founder and CEO Maria González said. "They do not know who is selling the product, which product they qualify for, what is the income requirements, and there is so much information." 

González said information is often not readily available to Spanish-speaking entrepreneurs, along with the information they need when considering plans with eligibility for those with DACA, lack of documentation or with mixed-status families. 

"It's complicated because there are so many options, but there is a lack of information," González said. "There’s so many different needs. We have multi-cultural, multi-generational households. Our Latino families are pretty big, and within the families, we have entrepreneurs, small businesses. We have individual employees, and there is a variety of different needs that you cannot be addressing the need with one policy, with one insurance policy." 

Those who attended were in some cases looking for insurance for themselves or options for employees within their businesses. Carmen Sánchez attended hoping to receive clarity about the best plan for her. 

"We need to learn how to use health insurance related to coverage, co-pays, things that, well, sometimes scare us and sometimes we don't understand," Sánchez said. 

Sánchez said she came because it was an in-person resource and in her native language. 

"We think that we just pay the fee and then that's it, and no, that's not the case," Sánchez said. "I mean, there are things that we have to learn, and the truth is that I took away very important information, very important."

"Adelante is committed to ensuring we have transparent information, that we have those stakeholders that do this on a day to day that could come in and inform our community in Spanish and with that cultural sensitivity and understanding to say look, these are all of the plans," said González. "This is why you can qualify, or you may not qualify."

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