Posted on 07/27/2005 7:18:43 PM PDT by satchmodog9
WEDNESDAY, July 27 (HealthDay News) -- Countering the belief that immigrants to the United States use more than their share of health-care resources, a new study finds that just the opposite is true.
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According to research released this week, data suggest that the average immigrant consumes several hundred dollars less a year in health costs, on average, than the typical native-born citizen. Most strikingly, the researchers say health-care costs for the poorest immigrant children are 84 percent below those of native-born kids.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Once again, the needle on my BS meter swings over into the red zone.
In the case of illegal immigrants, it is far more often than not that the taxpayers and people with insurance who get stuck with the tab. In my opinion, even a dollar of taxpayer spending for health care on people who are in this country illegally is a dollar too much.
I agree and that is what pissed me off about this article. The focus gets shifted away from the illegal who is stealing healthcare dollars from the taxpayers.
Not only are they mixing together illegal and legal immigrants they are minimizing the issue, so what even if the average payments lower for some people, if there enough socialists payments then that can bankrupt our government !
Big deal what the relative costs are, its the absolute cost!
That's like telling an alcoholic that beer contains less alcohol than whiskey therefore it is safe to drink as much as one likes, without worry!
Did they control for age? I would expect a 25 year old Mexican who just snuck across the border to have a lower health care bill than an 80 year old gringo. The problem is that the illegals and their employers are sticking the rest of us with their bills. You get cheaper construction and lawn care, with more expensive medical care. Is it worth it? Probably not.
They mean what they incur in medical expense.
Not what they pay. The non-immigrants have insurance. That isn't a public expense.
Taxpayer-funded medical outlays for health care provided to Texas' illegal alien population amount to about $520 million per year.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?
Illegal aliens threaten
U.S. medical system
Sunday, March 13, 2005
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:
Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or "kissing bug disease," is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. The disease also infiltrates America's blood supply. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected.
Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico.
Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills.
Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants as do intestinal parasites, says the report.
Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report includes a strong prescription for protecting the health of Americans:
Closing America's borders with fences, high-tech security devices and troops.
Rescinding the U.S. citizenship of "anchor babies."
Punishing the aiding and abetting of illegal aliens as a crime.
An end to amnesty programs.
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43275
And for the record, if anyone is interested:
Fact:
EIGHTY FOUR HOSPITALS HAVE CLOSED IN CALIFORNIA BECAUSE OF THE COSTS OF ILLEGAL ALIENS' UNPAID MEDICAL CARE.
No, he means wetbacks. The ultra-left wing now uses the incorrect label everywhere to intentionally mislead. He may be correct in his cost figures. The fact he overlooks is the fact that the wetbacks PAY nothing. Native borns pay taxes, income and real estate, with many having company paid insurance. The criminals may ccost less but the pay almost nothing. I'd also bet that there is strong correlation between age and health costs. The illegal criminals and their children or younger than native borns and don't yet have the heavy old-age medical costs.
I wonder how far you have to wade into the article to find out how much this average immigrant dude pays into the health care system.
I suppose that a high number of illegal immigrants, with their healthy non-consuming ways, is considered a boon to hospitals. Uh-Unh.
Are you saying all non-immigrants have insurance?
da, no
The surveys didn't ask questions about immigration status, however, and Mohanty said it's possible they may have missed some undocumented immigrants who were too afraid to answer questions.
Gee, ya think?!? Just a few, maybe?
Researchers also found that immigrant children were less likely than other kids to visit doctor's offices or take prescription medicines. On the other hand, the children of immigrants ended up consuming more in terms of higher emergency room costs, compared to the children of native-born Americans.
This isn't rocket science. People from third-world countries don't understand preventive medicine like we do here. They wait until they are very sick, then go to the nearest emergency room, where service is guaranteed and questions about ability to pay are asked later (at least when I lived in California that was the case).
I couldn't find anything in the article that says how much of the "health care costs" were actually paid by the people receiving the services. Only how much the value of those services was. Meaning -- that if you are talking about an emergency room at a County Hospital, then the people receiving the services might have had services worth a certain cost, but didn't necessarily pay for it out of their own pocket. We're talking costs, not individual expenditures by the recipients of the services.
This article proves absolutely nothing about what it claims to prove. It could easily be that "immigrants" receive health care less often than non-immigrants, but if the "immigrants" are not paying into the system, they are still consuming freely of services that others are paying for. What it does prove is that you can twist statistics to make them show pretty much anything you want them to show. (Lies, damn lies, and statistics)
The previous post mentioning the closure of all the California hospitals is dead on. The administrators of the hospitals are not fooled by statistical slight-of-hand -- for them it's simple dollars and cents. We are receiving this much money from patients and insurance companies for services rendered vs. we are giving out this much service. When the imbalance is unsustainable, they are forced to go out of business.
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