Emergency room doctors sue state of California (medical, health care, interstate)
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Frustrated emergency room doctors filed a class-action lawsuit against the state Tuesday, saying that California's overstretched emergency healthcare system -- which ranks last in the country for emergency care access -- is on the verge of collapse unless more funding is provided.
Across the state, scores of hospitals and emergency rooms have shut their doors in the last decade, leading to long waits, diverted ambulances and, in the most extreme cases, patient deaths.
Pediatric care shrinks across California Emergency doctors lawsuit (pdf)Contact the reporter with your experiences
Doctors say the situation is only getting worse. State officials, struggling to balance the budget, have proposed another $1.1 billion in Medi-Cal cuts.
"Are people truly suffering consequences? Absolutely," said Irv Edwards, one of the doctors represented in the lawsuit and president of Emergent Medical Associates, which staffs 14 emergency rooms in California. "This could happen to you or me. We could be traveling through San Francisco or San Jose, get in a car accident, have a broken leg and end up in the ER, where it takes hours to be treated regardless of our screams. Then we get to diagnosis, and they say, 'There's no orthopedic on call. I'm sorry.' "
Not one single mention of immigration in the article, so what is it doing here?
Quote:
Unlike other doctors who can choose not to accept Medi-Cal patients, emergency room doctors are required by federal law to treat every patient who walks through the door, regardless of their ability to pay.
Overburdened by the uninsured and overwhelmed by illegal immigration, public health care in Los Angeles is on life support.
Sixty percent of the county's uninsured patients are not U.S. citizens. More than half are here illegally. About 2 million undocumented aliens in Los Angeles County alone are crowding emergency rooms because they can't afford to see a doctor.
According to the State Association of Hospitals, California's public health system is "on the brink of collapse." In Los Angeles County, patients can wait four days for a hospital bed and up to two years for gallbladder surgery.
...
Mike Antonovich, the Los Angeles County supervisor, said the system has been "basically bankrupted."
The Department of Health has a $1.2 billion deficit. Caring for illegals is siphoning money from other services and forcing clinics, trauma centers and emergency rooms to close, he said.
Illegal aliens bankrupting California hospitals - Right Side of the Rainbow (http://rightrainbow.com/2005/03/illegal-aliens-1.html - broken link)
Los Angeles, AP - A financially troubled hospital that served as a principal care destination for Hispanic immigrants must now close its doors and it has many concerned the closure will overwhelm resources in the city's remaining emergency rooms.
A federal bankruptcy judge Friday ordered the Elastar Community Hospital in East Los Angeles to shut down. The 80-year-old hospital has racked up more than $10 million in debt and it couldn't afford to pay its roughly 400 workers.
The hospital filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last fall, but it didn't work. It has since been placed under Chapter 7 protection, which allows for a court-appointed trustee to begin liquidating its assets.
Elastar is the third hospital with an emergency room to close in the county this year.
"We cannot stand any more closures in an emergency system capacity in Los Angeles - this system is on the brink of absolute chaos," said Jim Lott, the executive vice president of the Hospital Assn. of Southern California.
Hospital Deportation of Chronically Ill but Stable Illegal Immigrants: “Patient Dumping”?
This excerpt from an article by Debra Sontag in the August 3 2008 issue of the New York Times sets the ethical and legal issue. She writes:
Mr. Jiménez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.
American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.
Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.
The ethical question is was justice served by the U.S. government to place a burden on all hospitals, requiring them to treat all patients who enter their emergency room (including illegal aliens or the newly arrived legal immigrants) , (EMTALA law),not to transfer them until they become clinically stable for transfer to another facility but then ignoring the hospital’s dilemma when they are unable to find another facility for transfer, the patient ending up as a long term resident of the admitting hospital. There is no financial compensation to the hospital by the government for the prolonged stays and chronic treatments, once the patient is stable, if the patient is unable to pay. Of particular complexity is, as described in the article, when the patient is a citizen of another country. There are no federal regulations or state laws regarding how and under what conditions these patients can be returned to their country of origin.
My questions are: how much responsibility should hospitals be given in the final disposition of an illegal alien who has been stabilized and is ready for transfer to a facility for prolonged care but there is no facility to accept the patient since the patient may not be able to pay for such care and there is no payment by the U.S. government? Should the admitting hospital continue to care for the chronically ill but stable patient indefinitely assuming all costs? Should the hospital involved take the responsibility for deporting the patient to the country of origin? Is returning a chronically ill but stable patient to such a country that has lesser facilities for prolonged care essentially “patient dumping”? Should the U.S. government, rather than the individual hospital, be responsible for the cost of medical care and process of deportation of illegal immigrant patients? ..Maurice.
Why are taxpapers providing hospital care for illegal aliens?
Human Events, Aug 12, 2002 by Schlafly, Phyllis
The big health-care debate in Congress this summer was over the wrong issue. Instead of threatening to bankrupt Medicare by forcing the taxpayers to buy prescription drugs for seniors, Congress should relieve the taxpayers and paying-patients of the burden of providing hospital care for illegal aliens.
From Florida to California, illegal aliens show up at hospital emergency rooms and the costs are passed along to paying patients and to local taxpayers. The American Hospital Association estimates that the costs of bad debt and charity care run into the billions.
A Martin County, Fla., hospital has spent $900,000 (with no end in. sight) caring for a Guatemalan illegal, who appeared at the emergency room two years ago with a brain injury after an automobile accident. He has no money and no family, but somehow he has a lawyer who has successfully prevented deportation to Guatemala.
A Jamaican illegal spent 17 months under care at the same hospital. After he ran up a bill of $500,000, he was finally sent home to Jamaica.
St. Mary's Medical Center in West Palm Beach treats one or two illegals a week and Delray Medical Center about 75 a month. Hospitals are required to provide care to anyone who shows up with a life-threatening condition.
Rep. Mark Foley (R.-Fla.) has persuaded the General Accounting Office (GAO) to study the financial costs that illegal aliens impose on hospitals. He says, "we need to remedy this problem before we can no longer afford to take care of Americans."
Many Arizona hospitals have to treat automobile accident victims of dangerous driving by what are called "people smugglers.". Two Tucson hospitals were stuck with treating a half dozen illegal aliens who were injured in a nighttime crash of their car traveling on the highway at 100 miles an hour.
A San Antonio hospital treated victims suffering from dehydration after police discovered up to 70 men, women, and children in a tractor-trailer rig at a truck stop. Another tractor-trailer rig loaded with 40 illegal aliens, two of them dead from suffocation, was also found in July in Dallas.
The Palomar Medical Center in Escondido, Calif., has been caring for a comatose Mexican illegal ever since he got drunk and was struck by a car in May. He can't pay for the care, of course, but his lawyer is fighting his deportation to a Tijuana hospital.
San Diego hospitals had to face the burden of caring for 31 accident victims (not counting the seven who were killed) when a van carrying illegals from Mexico and Brazil crashed going the wrong way on an interstate at night with its headlights turned off.
Some aliens look upon an automobile accident as their entry ticket into the United States. They get treated at an American hospital and then may be released into no one's custody, and no one has any figures on the numbers.
Instead of dealing with these existing health-care burdens, some members of Congress are trying to hit the taxpayers with even more costs for illegal aliens. They are trying to make illegal aliens eligible for instate tuition rates at publicly funded colleges and iinivemities.
Texas and California are already subsidizing these aliens who have broken our laws while discriminating against students in lawful, taxpaying families from the other 48 states. A student from Arizona, for example, pays four times as much to attend the University of California as an illegal alien.
Last year the taxpayers who finance Medicaid paid the hospital bill for 6,000 illegal aliens to have their babies in Colorado. This totaled $30 million, an average of $5,000 per baby.
Those 6,000 births to illegal aliens are 40% of the births paid for by Medicaid in Colorado. Those 6,000 babies immediately became U.S. citizens and qualified for all Medicaid services at a cost that is not even tabulated.
To get immediate care, the illegal only has to say she is "undocumented." Pregnant American mothers can't avoid their birth-of-- a-baby expenses so easily.
Denver Health is asking taxpayers to approve a bond issue to pay for a bigger obstetrics unit. The present unit was built for 1,600 births a year but last year it handled 3,500.
This Colorado information was reported by Al Knight of the Denver Post editorial board. He concluded with a fascinating comment: "There are many groups and interests that for one reason or another don't want this information to be available or to be discussed."
He didn't identify the "groups and interests." Who they are would be a good question to ask your Member of Congress, along with why Congress isn't doing its duty to protect Americans from the continued influx of illegal aliens.
Overburdened by the uninsured and overwhelmed by illegal immigration, public health care in Los Angeles is on life support.
Sixty percent of the county's uninsured patients are not U.S. citizens. More than half are here illegally. About 2 million undocumented aliens in Los Angeles County alone are crowding emergency rooms because they can't afford to see a doctor.
According to the State Association of Hospitals, California's public health system is "on the brink of collapse." In Los Angeles County, patients can wait four days for a hospital bed and up to two years for gallbladder surgery.
...
Mike Antonovich, the Los Angeles County supervisor, said the system has been "basically bankrupted."
The Department of Health has a $1.2 billion deficit. Caring for illegals is siphoning money from other services and forcing clinics, trauma centers and emergency rooms to close, he said.
Illegal aliens bankrupting California hospitals - Right Side of the Rainbow (http://rightrainbow.com/2005/03/illegal-aliens-1.html - broken link)
It's fun to scapegoat illegal immigrants for everything isn't it?
especially when it is the truth huh.
I'd love to take my phone over to the er right now and film it. All you have to do is go around asking questions in english, then spanish about why they are in there.
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