What you are missing is once they are legalized(registered) they are entitled to those benefits and they are already broke. Previous Republican amnesty bills would have loaded millions of illegals onto SS and medicare after they are 65.
YES you should have to show an ID to get in a hospital or face an investigation to find out who you are. You are aware that someone gets stucking paying those hospital bills of illegals, right??? If it's free someone pays. I know it seems compassionate to ignore that fact, ala Bush 'compassionate conservatism' made believe no one pays for anything the government gave away.
You are fun to debate :) It's been a while.
Thanks. I just try to see more than one point of view. Personally, if it were up to me, there would be no immigrants allowed in at least til the economy is better. Especially the H1B visas!
You can't really mean what this literally says.
Identification and insurance verification normally happens in most hospitals after treatment, not before treatment. Maybe what you mean to say is that the normal procedure should change for routine treatment, but what about emergencies? After all, it's the true emergencies (not just somebody walking into the ER with a broken finger or runny nose) that account for some of the worst high-cost bills, second only to long-term chronic care of the elderly.
It's not uncommon that people who arrive via an ambulance or a helicopter to an emergency room don't have identification documents with them. Most do, but a fair number don't. Surely you aren't suggesting that a person airlifted 90 miles from the scene of a three-vehicle crash with critical injuries should be stuck in the waiting room while the nursing staff call the highway patrol or local police to have them hunt around the crash scene for the missing identification documents, and then verify citizenship status? (BTW, lots of people in the United States legally on various types of temporary status such as students aren't citizens.)
Most hospitals fall into one of three categories: nonprofit charitable organizations, many of which are Roman Catholic or have other religious motivations to care for those who are unable to pay; government-run hospitals, which in most cases actually get very little of their money from direct tax support; and private for-profit hospitals.
I don't have a problem with a private organization deciding who they want to treat, and if that includes illegal aliens who can't pay, so be it. The consequence of government regulations controlling who businessmen can sell to are far worse than a private hospital making its own decisions on who they'll accept as a nonpaying patient. Same for a nonprofit organization — if a Roman Catholic or Baptist hospital sees part of its key mission being providing medical care for those who can't afford it, I don't want government regulating their religious mission by mandating proof of citizenship first.
The real issue is whether illegal aliens should be allowed to get medical care at government-run hospitals. That's a legitimate public policy question, and I'm open to arguments for or against it, though as with anything else, we need to show a clear and pressing need for a change before making a change of that magnitude. However, I think we may find that there are unintended consequences of refusing to provide medical treatment for illegal aliens in government-run hospitals. I think a hospital run by city, county, state or federal authorities has that right, and the supervising government agency has the right to direct them to do that, but I'm not sure it's a good idea.