Posted on 07/21/2002 11:45:04 AM PDT by Schatze
(CNSNews.com) - As Congress considers a reorganization of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, some members are also taking a closer look at the cost of illegal immigration, especially to the nation's hospitals.
"We basically want to know ... how much these hospitals are being hit ... and what are their recommendations [as to] what we should do," Chris Paulitz, a spokesperson for Rep. Mark Foley (R-Florida), told CNSNews.com. "It's just hard for these hospitals to keep staying afloat with this, especially in our area in Florida."
In a recent letter to U.S. Comptroller General David Walker of the General Accounting Office (GAO), Foley acknowledged the legal and moral responsibility of hospitals not to turn anyone away, but expressed concern over the financial burden imposed as "hospitals are inundated with thousands of illegal immigrants seeking medical care."
"We need to remedy this problem before we can no longer afford to take care of Americans," Foley said. "The parasitic effects on our health care system must be inoculated immediately.
"The world must realize that, while we gladly accept its tired, poor and huddled masses, we also have rules that govern their entrance," he explained. "We must make clear that these rules apply to both foreign nations and its citizens."
Foley stated in an op-ed earlier this year that the U.S. "should not be burdened because of the failure of a foreign nation to maintain responsibility for its people." He is now asking the GAO to make recommendations on possible solutions for alleviating this problem.
But Tanya Broder, staff attorney and policy analyst for the National Immigration Law Center (NILC), disagreed with Foley's actions.
"The cost of treating an undocumented person isn't different from the cost of treating another uninsured adult," she stated. "The only issue is that our federal government is excluding some persons from public health coverage because of their immigration status.
"Claiming that the solution to uncompensated care is getting rid of undocumented immigrants ignores the fact that a growing number of citizens and lawfully present immigrants do not have access to health care," Broder added. "We need to reexamine how we care for the uninsured throughout our health care delivery system."
However, David Ray, a spokesperson at the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said American taxpayers, not illegal immigrants, are the ones suffering discrimination.
"The only person getting the short end of the stick in this whole bargain is the taxpayer and disadvantaged Americans who rely on public health centers to stay alive," said Ray, pointing out that illegal aliens "are showing up for free health care and then going home." If a U.S. citizen tries to do that, Ray said, the hospitals would "find ways of extracting payment from you, by hook or by crook."
The American Hospital Association (AHA) has a system that keeps track of general uncompensated care, defined as the "estimated cost of bad debt and charity care to the hospital." According to the AHA's records, the national uncompensated care cost in 2000 was $21.6 billion or six percent of total expenses.
Ray pointed out that the Federation for American Immigration Reform's estimate of the national cost incurred by illegal aliens for Medicare and Medicaid is $3.7 billion.
"It's an enormous cost and can be very crippling, especially in border-states," Ray explained. "The federal government is the one that's dropping the ball in allowing poor immigration enforcement to [negatively affect] the state's pocketbooks."
Cecilia Munoz, a policy analyst at the National Council of La Raza, calls efforts to change immigration at the health care level "unrealistic" and said "focusing on what happens in hospitals is not going to provide immigration reform."
To Ray, however, even if Foley's efforts don't alleviate the problems in Florida, "it's always useful to remind us [of] all the enormous costs associated with illegal immigration."
The objective of the media in this country is to transfer wealth and property from those who have obtained without merit or right to those who deserve it and are identified by, well, the media, academia and ultra-left wingers.
Please ensure that your postings in the future comply with these facts.
Here in Alamance County, North Carolina - just under 8% illegals - any comparison of the number of new classroom spaces being built with a $22 million school-construction bond passed in the past seven years and the number of English-as-second-language kids has half the new classroom spaces being built going for children of illegals.
Also note while physicians are taking a 5.1 percent decrease in already low Medicare rates, scheduled to be reduced a total of 21 percent over next 4 years or so (from which they have to pay business overhead) Congress is gearing up to give itself another pay raise this year, and they do not have to pay any overhead.
"Claiming that the solution to uncompensated care is getting rid of undocumented immigrants ignores the fact that a growing number of citizens and lawfully present immigrants do not have access to health care," Broder added. (No; YOU are ignoring the issue at hand. We're talking about how we're tired of footing the bill for people who are here ILLEGALLY. Please try and stay on subject, liberal.) "We need to reexamine how we care for the uninsured throughout our health care delivery system."
Immigrants are often uninsured and underinsured. Forty-three percent of noncitizens under 65 have no health insurance. That means there are as many as 9.4 million uninsured immigrants -- in 1995 -- who constitute a disproportionate share of the total number of uninsured persons in the nation. 1 (By 1997 that number, has climbed to 9.9 million.) Earlier attempts by Immigration and Naturalization Service officers to require that new immigrants have health insurance were quashed by the INS administration. 2 The cost of the medical care of these uninsured immigrants is passed onto the taxpayer, and strains the financial stability of the health care community.
Another problem is use of hospital and other emergency services rather than preventative or normal medical attention. For example, the 29 percent of the illegal alien population is estimated to use public hospitals and clinics in a given year, compared to 11 percent use by the general U.S. population. 3
As a result, the costs of medical care for immigrants are staggering. The annual bill to the taxpayers for Medicaid received by immigrants is over $14 billion ($11.4 billion to legal immigrants, and $3.1 billion to illegal aliens). The cost is compounded by the immigrant bill for Medicare, $6.1 billion a year ($5.5 billion to legal immigrants and $.6 billion to illegal aliens). As of March 1997, there were 2.9 million immigrants receiving Medicaid, of whom 2.2 million were non-U.S. citizens.
As serious as these problems are, they are secondary to the threat of reintroducing serious contagious diseases into our society. "Contagious diseases that are generally considered to have been controlled in the United States are readily evident along the border. ... The incidence of tuberculosis in El Paso County is twice that of the U.S. rate[.] [Director of the El Paso heath district] Dr. Laurence Nickey also reports that leprosy, which is considered by most Americans to be a disease of the Third World, is readily evident along the U.S.-Mexico border and that dysentery is several times the U.S. rate. ... People have come to the border for economic opportunities[,] but the necessary sewage treatment facilities, public water systems, environmental enforcement[,] and medical care have not been made available to them, causing a severe risk to health and well being of people on both sides of the border." 4
Consistent with the El Paso incidence of tuberculosis cited above is more recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that indicates that in 1999, the American rate for TB fell to an all-time low of 17,531 active cases. But the incidence of active cases among immigrants, who are a tenth of the population, rose and accounted for over 40 percent of the cases. The incidence among immigrants rose by 2.6 percent (from 7,402 in 1993 to 7,591 in 1998). Most cases were found in people from Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, China, India, Haiti and South Korea, countries where TB is prevalent. Those countries accounted for about two-thirds of foreign-born persons with TB. Six states accounted for nearly three-quarters of the TB cases. They were California, New York, Texas, Florida, New Jersey and Illinois. Those six states accounted for 38.9 percent of the total U.S. population in 1990 and 72.9 percent of the foreign-born population. 5
"The pork tapeworm, which thrives in Latin America and Mexico, is showing up along the U.S. border, threatening to ravage victims with symptoms ranging from seizures to death. ... The same [Mexican] underclass has migrated north to find jobs on the border, bringing the parasite and the sickness cysticercosis its eggs can cause[.] Cysts that form around the larvae usually lodge in the brain and destroy tissue, causing hallucinations, speech and vision problems, severe headaches, strokes, epileptic seizures, and in rare cases death." 6
Typhoid struck Silver Spring, Maryland, in 1992 when an immigrant from the Third World, (who had been working in food service in the United States for almost two years) transmitted the bacteria through food at the McDonald's where she worked. River blindness, malaria, guinea worm, have all been brought to Northern Virginia by immigration. 7
Contrary to common belief, tuberculosis (TB) has not been wiped out in the United States, mostly due to immigration. In 1995, there was an outbreak of TB in an Alexandria high school, when 36 highschoolers caught the disease from an immigrant student. 8 The four greatest immigrant magnet states have over half the TB cases in the U.S. 9 In 1992, 27 percent of the TB cases in the United States were among the foreign-born; in California, it was 61 percent of the cases; in Hawaii, 83 percent; and in Washington state, 46 percent.
Disease within in the immigrant community can be particularly difficult to combat. "Immigrants present a special challenge, as health officials struggle with language and cultural barriers to find active TB cases and cure them before they spread to the general population." 10 "When the migrants develop TB they often remain untreated, as health systems tend to overlook mobile individuals. They can then spread TB to others in crowded housing and can infect otherwise healthy populations as they move through new towns and countries. ... And as many as half the world's refugees my be infected with TB." 11 Legal immigrants must pass a medical examination, and a number of communicable diseases constitute grounds for visa denial. However, there are only eight diseases that bar immigrants from admission. 12 And of course, illegal immigrants, who are the most likely to have communicable diseases, are not screened at all. To better ensure public safety, we must end illegal immigration. And to reduce the burden on public health services, we need to reform legal immigration to assure the American taxpayer that legal immigrants are being adequately screened for their ability to be responsible for their own health care and to assure that they are not introducing exotic communicable diseases.
FAIR, 12/00
.... and the check is in the mail. You work in Tijuana Norte, don't you? Cudahy, wasn't it? How many have been rounded up and kicked out around there? How's Marco Fleaball these days?
Stay well, you don't want to experience this.
Get real. Due to the extreme ghettoization of immigrants - particularly illegals - in just a few states, this is drowning those states' hospitals and health-care systems.
It's why Kalifornia now has many public hospitals shutting down - because half the illegals in the entire U.S. live there!
IMMIGRATION resource library - with public-health facts of immigration!
No, the hospitals are hiring people from Pakistan, India etc etc, that can barely communicate in English. This can be very dangerous for the patients.
And yes, there have been several raids at hospitals in Denver, LA and Atlanta where workers behind the scenes were in country illegally.
Not all that work in hospitals are doctors....
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