The Asian American Healthcare Gap
They are the most insured minority group in America, facing some of the highest disease burdens in the country. The opportunity to reach them is large — and largely unaddressed.
There is a patient in Flushing, Queens. She has Medicare. Her plan covers the hepatitis B antiviral her doctor recommended three years ago, but she has not filled the prescription.
It’s not that she can’t afford it. It’s that no one has explained her coverage to her, in Mandarin, the way she can understand.
Her story, repeated across Vietnamese communities in Garden Grove, Korean neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and South Asian enclaves in New Jersey, points to one of the most significant unmet opportunities in pharmaceutical outreach today: a large, insured, high-need population that has not been reached in ways that work.
The Numbers Behind the Gap
Asian Americans are America’s most insured minority group. An estimated 94% of Asian Americans had health insurance coverage in 2024, compared to 92% of the total U.S. population.1 Economically, the community has significant resources: the median household income for Asian American households reached $108,710 in 2024 — the highest among all racial and ethnic groups.2
And yet coverage, by itself, has not translated into utilization. Privately insured Asian Americans report significantly lower rates of cancer screening than privately insured non-Hispanic whites — even when insurance status is held constant. Research points to the gap between having coverage and understanding how to use it, particularly in communities where English proficiency is limited and the healthcare system feels unfamiliar.3
This highlights the limitations of providing insurance coverage alone as a strategy to eliminate disparities for Asian Americans without also addressing cultural factors.
Specific Diseases. Specific Gaps. Specific Treatments.
This is not a generalized disparity story. The conditions that bear down most heavily on Asian American communities are ones where therapies are approved, coverage exists under Medicare and Medicaid, and the distance between a diagnosis and a filled prescription is a matter of education and access, not science.
Hepatitis B and Liver Cancer
Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders make up 50% of the hepatitis B infection burden in the United States and have liver cancer rates up to 13 times higher than Caucasian populations, despite comprising just 6% of the U.S. population.4 Antiviral therapies are established, covered under Medicare Part D, and clinically proven to reduce the progression to liver failure and cancer. Yet adherence to hepatitis B treatment among Asian Americans remains as low as 16–32%, and adherence to recommended monitoring as low as 40–53%. 3, 4
Type 2 Diabetes
The diabetes gap in this population has a structural dimension that makes it distinct from other groups. Asian Americans develop type 2 diabetes at significantly lower BMI thresholds than white patients — a biological reality that standard screening protocols often miss. The consequence is predictable: as of 2019, Asian Americans had the highest percentage of undiagnosed diabetes compared to White, Black, and Hispanic Americans. Patients who don’t know they have the disease are not filling prescriptions to manage it. The treatments are covered, but the patients are just not in the system.5, 6
Chronic Kidney Disease
Kidney disease and diabetes are closely linked conditions, and the utilization gap in one compounds the other. Asian American adults were 10% more likely to have chronic kidney disease than U.S. adults overall. For Medicare patients specifically, monitoring and management protocols are covered, but as with diabetes, uptake in this population lags behind clinical need.1
Cardiovascular Disease
For years, aggregated data suggested that Asian Americans carried lower cardiovascular risk than other groups. That picture has changed as researchers have begun disaggregating subgroup data. By separating Asian subgroups, researchers identified populations at significantly higher cardiovascular disease risk than previously understood — groups that may benefit from enhanced prevention and treatment strategies.7
South Asians show high prevalence of traditional cardiovascular risk factors, particularly diabetes, while Southeast Asians face high rates of hypertension and age-adjusted stroke mortality. Filipino adults carry a particularly pronounced cardiovascular burden. Across these subgroups, the same pattern holds: documented disease, available treatment, and utilization that falls short of what the clinical evidence supports.3
A Population That Is Growing Rapidly
The demographic context matters for understanding the significance.
Asian Americans are the fastest-growing major racial group in the United States, comprising 6.7% of the total population in 2024, with a 4.2% annual growth rate — having more than doubled in population since 2000. By 2060, that population is projected to approach 36 million.2
The connections between cultural awareness, disease prevalence, effective treatment, adherence, and improved outcomes for diverse groups are now well-documented.
What Effective In-Culture Outreach Requires
Campaigns that move this population share several characteristics:
Language specificity over translation. Effective outreach is rebuilt for each community, not translated from a general market original. A Vietnamese-language campaign designed around Vietnamese media habits and cultural contexts is a different product from an English campaign with Vietnamese subtitles.
Coverage literacy as the core message. For many Asian American Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries, the most actionable information is not about the disease — it is about what their plan actually covers. Explaining, clearly and in the right language, that a medication has a zero-dollar copay or that a screening is fully covered removes a barrier that no amount of clinical awareness can address on its own.
Community channel strategy. Multicomponent interventions that include patient education, patient navigation, and mobile health reminders delivered by bilingual community health educators have shown measurable improvements in treatment adherence among Chinese and Vietnamese Americans. Religious institutions, community health centers, ethnic media, and community organizations are all channels that reach patients who may not be reachable through mainstream media.
Subgroup specificity. “Asian American” encompasses more than twenty distinct communities with different languages, disease profiles, cultural relationships to medicine, and media environments. Campaigns built with this specificity in mind consistently outperform those that treat the population as homogeneous.
The Opportunity, Plainly Stated
The Asian American patient population is insured, growing, concentrated in measurable geographies, and facing conditions where covered treatments already exist. The utilization gap is documented in peer-reviewed literature. The interventions that close it are tested and replicable.
The data exists to lay the foundation for outreach. Healthcare disparities, adherence challenges, and patient engagement gaps have been documented, making the case for investment clear.
What remains is execution: campaigns built for this population, in their languages, through the channels they trust, with a clear message about what their coverage means for their health.
The woman in Flushing with the unfilled prescription is not a difficult patient to reach. She has insurance. She has a diagnosis. She is simply waiting for the information she needs to arrive in a form she can use.
That is a solvable problem. And the organizations that solve it will be the ones her community turns to, and stays with.
APartnership develops in-culture, in-language healthcare campaigns for Asian American communities across Medicare and Medicaid. Contact us to learn more about reaching this high-need, high-coverage population.