Lucía Félix Beltrán
Lucía Félix Beltrán is a Senior Research Fellow at the Latino Policy and Politics Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health in 2023. Her research interests span the fiscal decision space underlying health financing to health equity and the intersection between poverty and health. Currently, her main line of inquiry focuses on the ways in which health reform has shifted health financing arrangements in Latin American countries, with a particular emphasis on Mexico. Her dissertation explores how health reforms affected the interaction between the public and private sectors in the financing and delivery of the Mexican health system between 2004 and 2020. In parallel, she has worked on numerous projects that aim to understand and reduce health vulnerabilities and barriers faced by immigrants in the United States. Through the use of qualitative and quantitative analysis methods, she has contributed to the elaboration of several policy briefs that include topics such as patient and provider perspectives of the Latino physician shortage in California, the chilling effects of public charge on health access among children in California, equity gaps in telehealth use to during COVID-19, as well as policy toolkit with available policy options for state and local governments to expand health coverage for undocumented immigrants. Her research has also been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Public Health Nutrition, Health Affairs, Health Services Research, and the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health. Her research has been funded by UCMEXUS-Conacyt, the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration, and the UCSD Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies.
