[janetgreen]

Visit a hospital in California

California emergency rooms are filled with non-English speakers, coming for free medical care. In many hospitals even the nurses have a hard time speaking English. No one in Washington seems to give a damn about this. The taxpayers are instructed to shut up and just pay for it.

[Regulator]

Hey, it ain't just the ER's, Janet. I've been spending a lot of time lately in a coastal hospital, and Spanish is the language of about half the occupants -- including the people working there (white males are limited pretty much to only being there if they happen to have MD appended to their name).

Who's paying for all the fun? All you have to do is look at the brochures (all helpfully in Spanish) and listen to the Social Workers (who are all, conveniently, fluent in Espanol). The answer is...MediCare, MediCal, and in my county, MediCruz. Oh and WIC (application forms helpfully available in the hospital), California Childrens Services (CCS), etc.

In other words...we are.

It's a real eye-opener.