Don’t they sign up for Medicaid, after being stabilized, or sign whatever forms are put in front of them after they get sick in order to get continued care?
If all we did for illegal aliens was “stabilize” them, our costs wouldn’t be as high as they are now. This reminds me of something from several years ago. I was on a cruise ship, and at our table was a couple. The guy was a conservative, NRA member; the woman was a liberal who worked as a contract ICU nurse. At the time the ACA was still up in the air, and she was strongly for it.
She said that she had seen insurance companies go out of their way to deny care to potentially healthy (if they got the care) young people, and thought O-care would fix that. Then she came up with a real stunner. She said, “Do you know who gets the best care? Illegal aliens, because there’s no gatekeeper to control costs.”
I don’t know about that. I just know that we have a bloated bureaucracy and I find it hard to believe that an illegal, say, in the emergency room for what they declare as an emergency can be automatically signed up for Medicaid.
If this were true, then why did 1.46 million of the 1.6 million who have signed up for CACA have to got through all this trouble? Seems to me they could have taken their cold or booboo to the nearest emergency room and gotten it automatically if that were true.
And don’t forget the inmates.
If everyone had no insurance we would be better off. Prices would come down for everyone.
As for illegals. The ER makes up the costs by overcharging everyone else.
For an uninsured patient to get emergency medicaid they have to be hospitalized for 30 days. One can’t just sign up in the emergency room. We do have a couple of patients a year meet the 30 day requirement, but when the average length of stay in our hospital is around 3 days, its pretty rare.