Posted on 03/13/2005 8:40:59 AM PST by hope
Sunday, March 13, 2005
INVASION USA
Illegal aliens threaten
U.S. medical system
Docs journal reports hospitals being closed, previously vanquished diseases being spread
Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker.
He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 – all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" – an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently.
But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian.
The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies."
While President Bush says the U.S. needs more "cheap labor" from south of the border to do jobs Americans aren't willing to do, the case of the Silverios shows there are indeed uncalculated costs involved in the importation of such labor – public support and uninsured medical costs.
In fact, the increasing number of illegal aliens coming into the United States is forcing the closure of hospitals, spreading previously vanquished diseases and threatening to destroy America's prized health-care system, says a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
"The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences," writes Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of the report. "We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen."
According to her study, 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system.
"Anchor babies," the author writes, "born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income."
In addition, the report says, "many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease."
While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, the report estimates that at least 25 percent of those are illegal immigrants. The figure could be as high as 50 percent.
Not being insured does not mean they don't get medical care.
Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.
"Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency," says the report. "But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."
According to the report, between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals verge on closure, the author writes.
"American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies,'" says the report. "Illegal alien women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born within our borders. Anchor babies are citizens, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid: Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."
Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Because drug addiction and alcoholism are classified as diseases and disabilities, the fiscal toll on the health-care system rises.
When Linda Torres was arrested in Bakersfield, Calif., with about $8,500 in small bills in a sack, the police originally thought it was stolen money, explained the report. It was her Social Security lump sum for her disability -- heroin addiction.
"Today, legal immigrants must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residency green cards," writes Cosman, a medical lawyer, who formerly taught medical students at the City University of New York. "Illegal aliens simply cross our borders medically unexamined, hiding in their bodies any number of communicable diseases."
Many illegals entering this country have tuberculosis, according to the report.
"That disease had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin," says the report. "TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later.
TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to 'foreign born' people who have up to eight times higher incidences apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam."
Other health threats from illegals include, according to the report:
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report includes a strong prescription for protecting the health of Americans:
If you would like to sound off on this issue, participate in today's WND Poll.
big bump!
Yep. We don't really even need a fence for anything other than criminals.(and I want it. A tall one). If you stop what they are coming for they will stay home. How many Americans do you see rushing the Mexican border.
The quality of medical care in California ERs has collapsed under the burden of "free" care. Some beautiful young actress just died from pneumonia in Los Angeles after being turned away twice from an ER.
Well, at least we have our cheap lettuce.
This is so obvious, and yet it will never happen. Illegal border crossings were never a major problem until the creation of the welfare-entitlement state magnet.
Yeah, yeah I know. EVERYTHING Bush's fault. I prefer to go forward instead of backwards. It's time to fix the problem , not waste valuable time figuring out who caused it.IMO. As for freedom you have the right to say what you want. I have the right to disagree. JR has the right to ban if he doesn't want something on his web site. You have the right to continue it eleswhere. Sounds like a lot of freedom to me:')
Boring - this is very old news indeed. What do you think drove Calif Prop 186 back in 1994? We inherited the results long ago - now the rest of the country is catching up.
When my husband was in medical school at USC (U of Souther California) he delivered quite a few babies at the USC hospital. He said that many of the women told him that their doctors in Mexico gave them instructions on how to get to USC, and that their care would be free (free to them). They had directions on how to get to LA, and what buses to take to get to the hospital. Ain't that just great?
Some of the families who have anchor children do live in Mexico, across the border. There was a scandal in San Diego a few years ago - it turned out that school buses were going to the border, picking up kids whose families lived in Mexico (after all, these children were American citizens) and taking them to school. It seems that some government agency was putting a stop to it (can't remember which one, too many years ago) but that the schools didn't want it stopped. They wanted those kids to attend. Why? Because the schools get dollars for every little butt sitting at a school desk, whether they are here legally or not, and those kids meant dollars. A friend of mine who lived in the area told me that the school actually called him up when his daughter was home sick, and "encouraged" him to send her back as soon as possible, because for every kid that isn't there, it means a loss of federal dollars. They don't care about the kid, they just want the money.
"In this regard, he has been an utter failure."
I hate to say it, but you are 100% right. I will never forget shortly after Bush got in (and before 9/11 needless to say), I felt we needed to get Al Gore back. Bush seemed to want to be Presidente of Mexico and Clintoon was happily playing Mayor of Harlem.
Here was my motto: Bush in '04 somebody meaner in '08.
Come to my office building, the ENTIRE NATION of Ecuador is there EVERY DAY. In the words of the great Pearl Gould: Enough is enough and that's too much.
That may very well be, but have you ANY idea how many ignorant sheeple HAVEN'T yet heard?
SHOUT IT FROM THE ROOFTOPS!
I had the experience several years ago of taking my mother in law to the emergency toom at Stanford hospital for a serious breathing problem. They took her in right away because of her issue, but I was amazed at what I saw there. You had to walk through a metal detector to get into the waiting room, and I had to turn over a pocket knife I always carry. (got it back). The room was pretty packed, and hardly anyone spoke English. A lot of the people there appeared to parents with sick children, didn't appear to be emergencies. I don't know how many of them were illegal, can't tell by looking, but I'd never seen anything like before.
When my own mother was visiting from another state, she had an asthma attack and I took her to the emergency room at a hospital in Walnut Creek. It was not a county hospital like SF General. They weren't jam packed, and everyone spoke Enlish. No metal detectors, either. I would expect that this hospital didn't have much "illegal" clientel. I don't know how hospitals near the border can keep their emergency rooms open.
The big city (California and elsewhere) ERs are in free fall collapse due to the illegal invasion army, oops I meant undocumented immigrants.
I see no movement on this by GW. By next yr at this time the dems will be leading on this issue. There will be a dem president in 2008. The Sup Court will be changed with the liberal/international agenda. The consequences will be devastating to conservatives. All because GW is either too dumb or too stubborn or too compromised to handle this illegal invasion. Don't forget our role of being suckered continually into voting in this "Two-Party Cartel".
Are they just figuring this out?
LA hospitals have gone broke years ago, closed etc. TB has been on the increase for years. It will continue to get worse until this country becomes just like the rest of the third world with all their infectious disease and economic problems.
Hello!!
It's gone way past the point of being able to fix the problem now.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.