In Hialeah, Caridad Morales faces the U.S. healthcare crisis with onions and garlic.

Besides carefully using home recipes to stay healthy, she takes special precautions when driving and walking, making sure she doesn't fall, and even tries not to touch anything because she is prone to allergies.

``I live in fear because when you get sick and go to the doctor or the hospital, before asking you how you feel, they ask you if you have health insurance,'' said Morales, 61, who works at a cafeteria and has no health insurance. ``Right now I have a small cyst on my back and I'm just holding up.''

Like Morales, more than half of the adult population ages 18-64 in Hialeah survives daily without insurance, according to statistics the Census Bureau published last week. It's an alarming percentage compared to 14 percent nationwide, or 28 percent in Miami-Dade County.

One of the explanations: Hialeah is a predominantly Hispanic city and this is the ethnic group with the highest number of uninsured people in the country.

Given this disparity, one would expect that health reform would have among its priorities to close the gap and help minorities. I'm not talking about undocumented immigrants, who under the bills being discussed will not be eligible for any type of public medical insurance coverage, but about new legal immigrants who would not qualify for government-backed insurance plans.

Organizations that advocate Latino rights particularly worry about the amendments to President Barack Obama's plan recently laid out by the Senate Finance Committee. They would force immigrants to buy health insurance like the rest of the population, but in some cases they would not reap the same advantages.

For instance, legal immigrants would not be eligible to receive federal subsidies to buy health insurance through a proposed exchange of private insurers (meant to promote competition and lower prices) until after five years of residence in the country.

Households with mixed immigration status -- with both legal and undocumented family members -- would be penalized, because when studying family income to determine qualification for federal subsidies, only the members with legal status will count.

``It would give the impression that the family has a higher income [per capita] and is therefore not eligible for a subsidy,'' said Marco Murillo of the National Council of La Raza.

Another point: legal immigrants would have to undergo a status verification process before obtaining medical coverage. It's a very expensive bureaucratic process that delays applications and has frequent errors. Whoever gets seriously ill would not have the required time and strength to follow such a process.

Immigrant advocates also are upset because Obama proposed to keep undocumented immigrants from buying health insurance coverage using the exchange, even with their own money. By excluding them, they are forced to go to the emergency room when they get seriously ill, at taxpayers' expense.

There is no doubt that health reform is urgent. Although the United States spends more in healthcare than any other nation in the world, one of every six Americans lacks medical coverage and life expectancy is lower than other industrialized countries.

But if the idea is to foster more equality to allow millions of residents of cities like Hialeah to have affordable access to medical services, the government should not turn its back on immigrants.

To deny them amounts to a death sentence.

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