Dealing with the High Cost of Health Care

Eagle Forum.org ^ | August 14,2002 | : Phyllis Schlafly

[GrandMoM]

The big health-care debate in Congress this summer was over the wrong issue. Instead of threatening to bankrupt Medicare by forcing the taxpayers to buy prescription drugs for seniors, Congress should relieve the taxpayers and paying-patients of the burden of providing hospital care for illegal aliens. From Florida to California, illegal aliens show up at hospital emergency rooms and the costs are passed along to paying patients and to local taxpayers. The American Hospital Association estimates that the costs of bad-debt and charity care run into the billions.

A Martin County, Florida, hospital has spent $900,000 (with no end in sight) caring for a Guatemalan illegal who appeared at the emergency room two years ago with a brain injury after an automobile accident. He has no money and no family, but somehow he has a lawyer who has successfully prevented deportation to Guatemala.

A Jamaican illegal spent 17 months under care at the same hospital. After he ran up a bill of $500,000, he was finally sent home to Jamaica.

St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach treats one or two illegals a week and Delray Medical Center about 75 a month. Hospitals are required to provide care to anyone who shows up with a life- threatening condition.

Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) has persuaded the General Accounting Office to study the financial costs that illegal aliens impose on hospitals. He says "we need to remedy this problem before we can no longer afford to take care of Americans."

Many Arizona hospitals have to treat automobile accident victims of dangerous driving by what are called "people smugglers." Two Tucson hospitals were stuck with treating a half dozen illegal aliens who were injured in a nighttime crash of their car traveling on the highway at 100 miles an hour.

A San Antonio hospital treated victims suffering from dehydration after up to 70 men, women and children were discovered by police in a tractor-trailer rig at a truck stop. Another tractor-trailer rig loaded with 40 illegal aliens, two of them dead from suffocation, was also found in July in Dallas.

The Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, California, has been caring for a comatose Mexican illegal ever since he got drunk and was struck by a car in May. He can't pay for the care, of course, but his lawyer is fighting his deportation to a Tijuana hospital.

San Diego hospitals had to face the burden of caring for 31 accident victims (not counting the seven who were killed) when a van carrying illegals from Mexico and Brazil crashed going the wrong way on an interstate at night with its headlights turned off.

Some aliens look upon an automobile accident as their entry ticket into the United States. They get treated at an American hospital and then may be released into no one's custody, and no one has any figures on the numbers.

Instead of dealing with these existing health-care burdens, some members of Congress are trying to hit the taxpayers with even more costs for illegal aliens. They are trying to make illegal aliens eligible for in-state tuition rates at publicly funded colleges and universities.

Texas and California are already subsidizing these aliens who have broken our laws while discriminating against students in lawful, taxpaying families from the other 48 states. A student from Arizona, for example, pays four times as much to attend the University of California as an illegal alien.

Last year the taxpayers who finance Medicaid paid the hospital bill for 6,000 illegal aliens to have their babies in Colorado. This totaled $30 million, an average of $5,000 per baby.

Those 6,000 births to illegal aliens are 40 percent of the births paid for by Medicaid in Colorado. Those 6,000 babies immediately became U.S. citizens and qualified for all Medicaid services at a cost that is not even tabulated.

To get immediate care, the illegal only has to say she is "undocumented." Pregnant American mothers can't avoid their birth-of- a-baby expenses so easily.

Denver Health is asking taxpayers to approve a bond issue to pay for a bigger obstetrics unit. The present unit was built for 1,600 births a year but last year it handled 3,500.

This Colorado information was reported by Al Knight of the Denver Post editorial board. He concluded with a fascinating comment: "There are many groups and interests that for one reason or another don't want this information to be available or to be discussed."

He didn't identify the "groups and interests." Who they are would be a good question to ask your Member of Congress, along with why Congress isn't doing its duty to protect Americans from the continued influx of illegal aliens.

[GrandMoM]

....see how the government spends your hard earned tax!!!

[isthisnickcool]

Babies born to illegals should not automatically be citizens.

[GrandMoM]

....but they are!

....here in California the average Hispanic family has 5 or 6, and none of them speak english!

[GrandMoM]

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Friday, January 11, 2002

The Costs of Illegal Immigration
By
Senator Jon Kyl

When we think of illegal immigration, we tend to center our attention on the illegal aliens themselves - how they cross the border, the dangers they face, whether or not they should be granted amnesty or guest-worker status. This is only natural, since all of us tend to focus on complex issues from the human angle.

But there are other aspects of a vast problem like illegal immigration. Not much attention is paid to the tremendous costs of mandates imposed on states and local governments that must provide care to a swelling number of non-citizens within their borders. Yet those costs ultimately take a human toll, too. Every tax dollar spent on emergency care or criminal justice for an illegal immigrant has to be paid for by American taxpayers.

An Arizona mother about to deliver may face clogged emergency rooms and longer wait times than she otherwise would because of the tremendous burdens imposed by illegal aliens receiving federally-mandated emergency care. And, as columnist Michelle Malkin recently pointed out, while public funds are being used to provide care to illegal aliens, "indigent senior citizens - American citizens - must abide by stricter limits, fewer choices, and rising prices ... under their government health-care coverage."

We are a generous people, but more and more my constituents are saying this is unfair.

According to one estimate, the cost of providing federally-mandated health care to illegal immigrants is between $1.5 billion and $2 billion annually. Lawmakers still lack an accurate assessment of the actual cost to border states, which is why I requested a study of those costs to be completed this spring.

The citizens of the four border states pay a disproportionate share of these costs. The federal government is now helping to pay part of the cost, but not enough. In 1996, for example, I successfully attached amendments to the 1996 Immigration Reform Act that required that states, localities and hospitals be reimbursed by the federal government for costs to provide emergency medical treatment to illegal immigrants as well as the costs associated with providing emergency medical transport to illegal aliens injured while attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

For five years Congress reimbursed the states $25 million a year, but this funding will not be reauthorized after 2001. And so, joined by a bipartisan group of border-state Senators, I have introduced legislation to provide $200 million per year in reimbursements to border states, providing reimbursement not only to the states and localities themselves, but also hospitals, doctors, and other providers. As a modest start in that effort, Congress last month agreed to my request for $800,000 in additional health-care reimbursement to the four Arizona border counties, Pima, Yuma, Cochise, and Santa Cruz.

Much more needs to be done.

In addition to addressing health-care costs, I asked Congress to authorize a study to ascertain the criminal justice costs to localities of illegal aliens. That study was completed in 2001, and found that, in 28 southwest border counties of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, the cost of processing illegal immigrants who commit crimes through local criminal justice systems is $125 million annually. While we were able to secure $7 million last year for southern Arizona counties for processing criminal illegal immigrants, it is obviously only a drop in the bucket.

We need a more commonsense approach to dealing with costs and problems of illegal immigration. A compassionate people must act to help those in need, but the needs of American citizens and taxpayers must also be considered.

[Jim Noble]

I am sure that we should "remedy this problem".

Are you prepared to send them away in labor, bleeding, having heart attacks?

If you are not, and if you are not just cost-shifting, what "remedy" do you propose?

[RicocheT]

If you want a cut in the cost of health care accross the board, vote for limits on tort recoveries and a cap on punative damages. The cost of insurance/drug prices/hospital care/doctor's pay are all driven up by the threat of costly lawsuits. Trial lawyers are running up the cost of every service and product in the US economy.

[GrandMoM]

Are you prepared to send them away in labor, bleeding, having heart attacks?

....no, I am not heartless. I would expect them to be treated until well enough to be deported and reimbursement from Mexico

If you are not, and if you are not just cost-shifting, what "remedy" do you propose

....armed guards at our borders to stop this influx of illegals draining our systems.

[GailA]

It's not just illegals. The Regional Medical Center in Memphis is a trauma center deluxe. Folks from Mississippi and Arkansas go there because of the high class trauma center vs their's. Last year the state of Tennessee picked up the tab for this trauma treatment of Mississippi residents to the tune of $17M. Mississippi was supposed to reimburse Tennessee for this. BUT reneged on the deal leaving the Tennessee taxpayer to pick up the tab.

[liberallarry]

First. Health care is really expensive. If you truly want to cut the costs, stop treating people who can't pay.

Second, illegal aliens are a separate issue. True, they're forcing the closing of emergency rooms and other emergency services, but health care costs would be high anyway.

Third. Tort reform would reduce costs by a fair amount but it would reduce medical care to a bigger crap-shot than presently. There are an awful lot of greedy and incompetent doctors out there - as well as greedy and incompetent lawyers.

It's extremely doubtful that any of the above will come to pass. People will never see it as fair that you should get only what you can pay for on this fundamental, life-and-death issue nor will we be willing to militarize the border and deport the millions of illegals. Doing so would require a full-fledged war with Mexico - and maybe several other countries as well.

[Cboldt]

First. Health care is really expensive. If you truly want to cut the costs, stop treating people who can't pay.

Absolutely agree - the best way to lower the cost is to make each customer take out his or her checkbook and pay the doctor. Insurance, and the distance it puts between the consumer and the provider, is probably THE biggest cause of high costs. When the consumer feels as if the care is "free," then there is no consumer pressure to contain cost.

Second, illegal aliens are a separate issue. True, they're forcing the closing of emergency rooms and other emergency services, but health care costs would be high anyway.

Agree on this as well. Between the cost to the public and the consumer to cover "uninsured," and the cost to each consumer for his own procedures that are not "necessary," I suspect that the cost of "unnecessary" services (including tort liability) represents the bigger share of the total health care expenditure.

Third. Tort reform would reduce costs by a fair amount but it would reduce medical care to a bigger crap-shot than presently. There are an awful lot of greedy and incompetent doctors out there - as well as greedy and incompetent lawyers.

I'm not sure tort reform is the answer here. Patients should have the right to sue the pants off incompetent and negligent health care providers. How we, as a society, decide what constitutes "incompetent" and/or "negligent" may be an issue, but the threat of tort liability does put pressure on the health-care industry to police its own. Maybe the answer here is also away from insurance, so that the individual practitioner risks his or her own future in the event of malpractice, instead of passing the buck off to a malpractice insurer.

It's extremely doubtful that any of the above will come to pass. People will never see it as fair that you should get only what you can pay for on this fundamental, life-and-death ue nor will we be willing to militarize the border and deport the millions of illegals. Doing so would require a full-fledged war with Mexico - and maybe several other countries as well.

But if the cost inflation is not due to treating illegal/uninsured, but rather in treating the rest of us, then even getting rid of the illegal/uninsured will not solve the health-care cost problem.

[Kozak]

Maybe the answer here is also away from insurance, so that the individual practitioner risks his or her own future in the event of malpractice, instead of passing the buck off to a malpractice insurer.

Let me tell you bub, as an ED physician who has been doing this for more then 20 years with no malpractice claims, the DAY I am in the situation where I am not covered by insurance is the day I walk from the job. Good luck finding any doc in that case.

Most malpractice claims are not about actual malpractice, they are about bad outcomes, and since I'm not God I have not control over that.

[Pining_4_TX]

The remedy is to get government out of health care completely. If people cannot pay, then they would have to rely on private charity. And if government gets out of health care and we have a true market in health care, then prices will come down and services will improve. Then it will be more feasible for private charities to be able to provide health care for the poor. It's also a helluva incentive to not have kids you can't afford and to try to better yourself. Right now, who needs to, when you can get your needs met by living off the taxpayers?

[supercat]

Health insurance costs are like a balloon. Squeeze them somewhere, and they'll bulge out somewhere else.

Actually, the situation is worse than that. Since government meddling has over the years discouraged people from becoming health care practitioners, the supply has been reduced and so the costs have increased even beyond the amount predicted by the 'squeezed balloon' metaphor.

Stabilizing the system (largely by getting government OUT) isn't going to be pleasant for anyone, but until the country can do so it will be living on borrowed time.

[janetgreen]

PING

[janetgreen]

I agree with you, it has to stop somewhere. Shifting the cost to the federal government instead of the states is still American taxpayer money, and for the life of me I can't accept the attempted brainwashing of America by the politicians who keep telling us that we must pay for this mess. Look at the figures. If they're already here by the millions, next year there will be a million more, and on and on, no relief in sight with our President and Congress salivating for hispanic votes.

We are the cash cow for the third world, and until we elect a President and a Congress who has the guts to put a stop to it, we'll go broke, the takers will outnumber the givers.

It's not only health care for illegals we're forced to pay for, homeowners will have to cough up more money to build new schools (this is on the coming Los Angeles ballot) because illegals are causing our schools to burst at the seams, and education to American kids takes a nose dive. They're collecting welfare and food stamps, and some even manage to get housing assistance money. Why should American taxpayers be forced to pay for all this when we're already struggling with the highest taxation in history?

Clinton started it, and Bush is continuing it. Our American culture is fading into the woodwork, and we're becoming the new slaves of America.

[4Freedom]

"Clinton started it, and Bush is continuing it."

Then politicians like Kyl come along and propose passing the costs along to the federal government, as if that money isn't gouged from the taxpayers, too.

He's a U.S. Senator. Why doesn't he urge the Governor to send the National Guard to the border and order local law enforcement to assist in deportations?

[FITZ]

Doing so would require a full-fledged war with Mexico - and maybe several other countries as well.

War with Mexico? Maybe Guatemala too? Not much to be afraid of here.

[FITZ]

When we think of illegal immigration, we tend to center our attention on the illegal aliens themselves

Illegals aren't the only problem. Once the illegal has a citizen baby, other family members can legally immigrate through family reunification, one of the largest groups we see here are immigrants over 65 years of age who come to get on Medicaid and SSI. It's legal because you only need to be 125% over the poverty level to "sponsor" an immigrant and you never have to intend to pay any costs of them. Many legals are ending right up on welfare programs.

[Publius6961]

Doing so would require a full-fledged war with Mexico - and maybe several other countries as well.

Unless all those countries convert to Islam first, the problem with that is...???

[Brownie74]

Clinton started it, and Bush is continuing it. Our American culture is fading into the woodwork, and we're becoming the new slaves of America.

I have always said that Bush didn't create the immigration problem but he can darn sure put a stop to it. But he won't.

It will be interesting to see who Bush puts in to replace Ziglar. If he does another Ziggy number I probably won't vote in 2004 or at best I won't vote republican. I definately won't vote for Bush.

Good article.