Why health care is so costly (Schlafly

While Americans without health insurance struggle with the problem of how to pay for medical care, Mexicans don't have that problem. They just ride in a Mexican ambulance across the border to a hospital in Arizona, New Mexico, California or Texas, and get free medical treatment.

The costs are currently paid by a combination of socking the taxpayers in those four border states plus inflating prices for patients who pay their own bills, insurance companies and Medicaid. This ridiculous situation is caused by a combination of U.S. officials allowing the Mexican cars to cross our border and the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, which mandates that U.S. hospitals with emergency-room services treat anyone who shows up for care, including illegal aliens. This unfunded mandate was legislated by a Congress that closed its eyes to the costs.

We are not just talking about Mexicans who may have had an accident close to the border. We are talking about Mexicans with serious health problems who are deliberately sent to the United States after Mexican hospitals discover they can't pay for services and have no insurance.

Sens. John McCain and John Kyl have proposed a solution for this dilemma: lighten the tax burden on their own state while shifting it to U.S. taxpayers nationwide. How parochial! They introduced a bill to hit the U.S. taxpayers for $200 million for medical treatment of illegal aliens.

A study made by the U.S.-Mexico Border Counties Coalition, an American lobbying group, found that U.S. hospitals in border states provide at least $200 million a year in uncompensated emergency care to illegal aliens. In the four border states, 77 hospitals now face a medical emergency.

Uncompensated care to illegal aliens in Arizona cost the Cochise County Health Department 30 percent of its annual budget, the Copper Queen Hospital in Bisbee $200,000 out of a net operating income of $300,000, the University Medical Center in Tucson $10 million, and the Good Samaritan Regional Medical Center in Tucson $1 million in only the first quarter of last year. The Southeast Arizona Medical Center in Douglas is on the verge of bankruptcy and some emergency rooms and pre-natal units have closed because they can't afford to stay open.

Arizona hospitals have offered donated medical equipment and ambulances to Mexican medical facilities, but Mexican customs officials have not permitted much of it to enter Mexico. They apparently prefer to send their sick to U.S. hospitals rather than care for them in Mexico. Other costs of dumping Mexicans on U.S. hospitals include transporting the seriously ill by helicopter from small border hospitals to Tucson or Phoenix. This cost ranges from $7,000 to $20,000 a trip.

In San Antonio, University Health System officials have proposed a statewide quarter-cent sales tax to help hospitals pay for uninsured persons who show up at the door. During the last three years, Houston's Harris County Hospital District spent $330 million to treat and immunize illegal aliens, an amount estimated to be at least 20 percent of the indigent caseload.

In California, where the state budget crunch is forcing reductions in Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program, observers warn of an approaching catastrophe in the health-care system. Almost one in five Californians lacks health insurance, yet the law requires hospitals to continue to serve illegal aliens free.

These costs are especially onerous because hospitals are struggling with falling Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates and rising medical malpractice premiums, and most states are struggling with revenue shortfalls. Hospitals are often hit with providing follow-up care when an uninsured patient remains bedridden for months.

It's not just the border states. Florida hospitals last year spent $40.5 million providing care to uninsured aliens.

All this is in addition to the many illegal aliens who are injured in highway accidents when the trucks they are jammed into like sardines are driven recklessly by uninsured Mexican drivers trying to evade police. Such accidents have occurred as far away as Utah and Iowa.

Another area where the U.S. taxpayers are taken for chumps is food stamps given to illegal aliens. Coming from countries that have no respect for a rule of law, they don't understand that selling food stamps is a crime.

Food-stamp fraud among illegal aliens came to light in 1996 when Ohio authorities discovered that a Jordanian man and his uncle had deposited $24 million in purchased food stamps in the bank accounts associated with their chain of food and video stores. A ring of Somali asylum seekers netted $40,000 in food stamp fraud. When are Americans going to wake up to the price we are paying because our government won't stop the invasion of illegal aliens?

I already explained how to stop illegal immigration. You stop illegal immigration by passing a law that requires the INS to check the employee information that is already reported with payroll routinely and to use that information to identify who is illegal and then tell the employer they can't keep employing that person. It would be better of course to force the employer to verify with the government who is legal and who is not before hiring. But in this way you stop illegal immigration nearly 100%. Whether we give amnesty or not is in my mind of little importance as to whether new illegals will come or not. If we want to enforce the law, then we can, if not, then we can't. It's just that simple. As I keep saying, in 1986 our congress decided that the one method for stopping illegal aliens could not be used. That one method was to force employers to contact the government and see if it's legal to hire them or not. We require them to look at docs now, but if the docs are fake, then we don't care at all. Whenever you use your credit card the clerk validates with the bank that you can spend. Otherwise people would just create fake credit cards just as they create fake docs to get hired now. It is just that easy. We simply have chosen not to do it.

and as I keep saying, if you think you can pass a real law as I'd like to stop illegal immigration in this manner, then you really have to include amnesty provisions to get it through congress. Politics involves compromise.

certainly we need to take more steps besides what I mentioned with the payroll data. But that one step is a big one.

I don't blame people for not wanting amnesty. We were lied to in 86 big-time when they said that was an amnesty coupled with a real determination to stop future illegal immigration. They gave us amnesty only and purposely dysfunctional law enforcement.

You're right, we need across the board changes in policies to handle things like welfare and medical care for illegals differently.

No US citizenship for the babies born here to illegals, I agree. No free medical care for people in ambulances who come across the border begging either. But here's how we handle that. We tally up all the money we spend in this medical care for foreign nationals in these border hospitals. Then we sit with Fox. We promise him some special money for development program of some sort. But we let him spend 90% of the money. Then, after we promise it to him and he agrees. We come back with a new provision. The money we spend on medical care for his nationals we deduct from the program. So, it will cost Fox money to let those nationals do that. So, he will stop it as best he can. No more ambulances flying across the border with sick people in other words. Because our medical care is 10 times as expensive as their medical care. That's why. Then we will have plugged the money sink so that it can only get smaller each year and shaped the mexicans' behavior in a positive way. and funded a development project.

But when bush allows the chinese to trade with the world with their currency fixed at an artificially low rate, then he destroys jobs in both the US and in Mexico. and we fight each other over dwindling jobs. Then bush says we're racists because we don't like his policies.

Bush is pro-h1b and implies that anyone who is for it is racist. bush is pro illegal immigration. Bush even has talked about creating a new class of worker who doesn't have full US citizenship rights and expand the number of workers in this non citizen status even. Bush just recently greatly increased social security obligations by increasing greatly the people we've promised to pay through it. This in essence is nail in the coffin for our plans to fund the elderly poor at today's levels. Bush said in the campaign he wanted to protect social security's ability to fund the elderly and then he sabotaged that fund's ability to do it. Bush says his immigration policy is to match willing employers with willing employees.

Y'all jump on me for being pro-amnesty. But what about Bush. You going to jump on him?

Our enemies are the incumbent politicians who don't work our will. That means 98% of them. We vote for the challenger candidate most likely to win regardless of that candidate's party or politics. In this way over a period of time just 5% of the population can turn american politics in a conservative direction. But voting for bush and bush type congressmen or senators destroys american sovereignty and destroys our economy as well.

Politics is a hard-ball game. If the citizens don't engage in it as a hard-ball game, then the citizens voluntarilly cut themselves out of the loop. You can't influence the politicians unless you vote them out. Today we re-elect 98% of incumbents. Republicans boast that in republican districts at least we beat the dems. Democrats boast that in democrat districts at least they beat the repubs. But in 80-90% of these districts the politicians ignore the interests and the desires of the americans at large. The americans at large should not be loyal to either republican or democrat party as these two parties, the dems and the repubs, have targeted the americans-at-large in a hard-ball manner. So, we target them and see who's boss.

That's the only way to handle it. Vote no on all incumbents that displease us until they begin to please us. Otherwise we lose.

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