16 Oct Closing Out Hispanic Heritage Month: What the Next Congress Must Do for Latino Families and Entrepreneurs
Hispanic Heritage Month ended October 15. The work doesn’t.
Every year during Hispanic Heritage Month, we celebrate the culture, resilience, and contributions of Latino Americans. As the month closes, the Health Equity Collaborative is turning that celebration into a challenge for the people we’re about to elect.
With Election Day on November 3, voters will soon choose the members of the next Congress. Among the first questions that Congress should answer is whether it will take the cost of care seriously, for the families who rely on it and for the small businesses that provide it.
Cost is a Health Empowerment Issue
When care is unaffordable, people delay checkups, skip prescriptions, and avoid treatment until problems become emergencies. Latino communities, which are younger, fast-growing, and heavily concentrated in small-business and service-sector work, can feel that pressure acutely. That’s why HEC has long called on lawmakers to confront the rising cost of care and to hold all healthcare stakeholders accountable for it.
A Letter Worth Reading
That’s why we want to highlight a recent letter to Congress from the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC), a valued member of HEC’s community, and dozens of local Hispanic chambers from across the country, including the National Puerto Rican Chamber of Commerce.
The letter urges lawmakers to make health insurance affordability a central part of the small-business agenda. The numbers behind it are sobering. Citing the Kaiser Family Foundation’s 2025 Employer Health Benefits Survey, the chambers note that the average annual family premium at firms with 10 to 199 employees rose from $16,977 in 2015 to $26,054 in 2025, an increase of 53 percent. Workers at these smaller firms also contribute an average of $8,889 a year toward family coverage.
The stakes are high for the Latino business community. The letter points out that the U.S. is home to more than five million Hispanic-owned businesses, which contribute over $900 billion to the economy each year. Many of these are newer enterprises with thinner margins and less access to capital, so a jump in coverage costs can have immediate consequences. Owners either absorb the increase, leaving less money for hiring and growth, or pass it on to employees through higher premiums, bigger deductibles, and slower wage growth. As the chambers put it, this is not just a healthcare issue but an economic competitiveness issue.
What makes the letter notable is that it doesn’t simply ask for costs to be shifted from one pocket to another. It asks Congress to examine what’s driving prices up, including:
- Competition and consolidation in insurance and provider markets
- Administrative costs and unnecessary barriers that add expense without improving care
- Transparency and accountability across the supply chain, including pharmacy benefit managers and other intermediaries
- Predictability, flexibility, and choice for small employers who lack the bargaining power of large companies
In the chambers’ words, small businesses “are not asking for special treatment.” They want a market as competitive and transparent as the ones they compete in every day.
What the Next Congress Should Prioritize
The USHCC letter focuses on employers, but its logic applies to every Latino family trying to get care at a price they can afford. HEC urges the next Congress to:
- Investigate the drivers of high prices. Examine consolidation, administrative waste, and opaque pricing practices across the system, and follow the evidence wherever it leads.
- Demand transparency from every link in the chain. Insurers, hospitals, intermediaries, and drug middlemen should all be accountable for how their practices affect what patients and employers pay.
- Support small-employer coverage. Hispanic entrepreneurs create jobs and often provide the only workplace coverage in their communities. Policies that give them more predictability and choice help workers too.
- Protect the safety net. Medicare and Medicaid are lifelines for seniors, low-income families, and people with disabilities. Lowering costs must not come at the expense of these programs.
- Keep equity at the center. Cost-cutting that ignores language access, workforce diversity, and representation in research will leave the communities that most need relief behind.
From Heritage to Action
Celebrating Latino contributions means little if the people making them can’t afford to stay healthy or keep their doors open. The USHCC and its partner chambers have made a clear, practical case. We hope candidates in every race will read it, and that whoever is sworn in next January will act on it.
We encourage our readers to review the letter, talk to candidates about affordability, and vote on November 3.
To learn more about HEC’s policy priorities, visit our Resources & Action page.