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In the USA, all the illegal immigrants (and their many children who live in poverty) are bankrupting hospitals. Hospitals must accept any person who requires emergency treatment, whether they have the ability to pay or not. Hospitals which are not willing to treat the poor for free are not elligible to bill the government Medicare program for any services. Hospitals have to pass on the increased costs from the emergency departments (which almost always are costly and unprofitable) to people who do have the ability to pay. This is one of the main reasons that medical costs are so high. The overburdened hospitals often do not have the resources to properly take care of all the people who cannot pay. When something goes wrong, the hospitals get sued for millions of dollars, or even are forced to shut down by government health regulators for not providing adequate care.
In crowded cities with many poor immigrants, there are long lines to get into the emergency rooms at the hospitals, the waiting rooms are crowded, and it is not uncommon for people to have to wait in lines which stetch outside the hospital. The waiting time is often hours. There have been countless instances of people dying will waiting for treatment. In Los Angeles, California, ambulances are often turned away from overburdened hospitals, often having to drive their patients to other hospitals, which can be up to 2 hours away. In Los Angeles, there are only two hospitals which are not facing impending bankruptcy!
When a hospital is forced to close down, it does not solve the problem. All the non-paying patients it formerly had to take care of have to drive farther to hospitals in more affluent areas. This can result in cascading failure, where the increased burden from one hospital shutting down creates an unsustainable burden on other nearby hospitals, which ultimately results in a chain of hospital closures. In lower income areas, there are often not any nearby hospitals left which accept Medicare.
You might ask why hospitals just stop accepting Medicare so they do not have to treat the poor for free.
In the USA, workers are taxed to pay for the Medicare system. The idea is that they are taxes while they are in their younger working years to help pay for their own medical expenses when they get older. If you want to get less expensive treatment at a hospital which does not have to treat the poor, you will not be getting any of your Medicare tax money back! You will have to pay the full ammount of the bill, and Medicare will not reimburse you or the hospital for any portion, despite the fact that you were taxed all of your working life.
How much are the Taxes?
Employers must withold 1.45% of the salaries of their workers, with the employer also paying an additional matching 1.45% of salaries paid. A self-employed individual must pay the entire 2.9% tax on self employed net earnings. Because of of the increasing burden on hospitals, the tax rate will soon be increased to 3.8% for higher incomes.
Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.
Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency. But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."
In 2010, the direct cost to taxpayers to provide free emergency health care for more than 52,000 illegal aliens in the state of Massachusetts alone was $35.7 million. Note that this is only the direct cost; the hospitals subsidize their emergency departments through charity or higher costs to other patients.
84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system. Between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals are on the verge of closure.
The Texas Hospital Association has estimated that the annual cost to hospitals of providing medical treatment to illegal immigrants, who are either unable or unwilling to pay, was nearly $400 million a year, of which the hospitals only get compensated about $100 million through the emergency Medicaid program paid for by the state.
The "Children with Special Health Care Needs" program is a supplemental health care program designed to help indigent children with extraordinary or chronic health care problems that are too expensive to treat in traditional Medicaid. Although the program does not distinguish between legal residents and illegal residents, most of the children enroled in the program are not citizens. In December of 2005, there were 1,452 non-citizens in the program, which constituted 68.8 % of all clients enrolled. 78.9% of the medical payments are spent on these non-citizens.
The USA is only beginning to see the medical costs from illegal immigrants, most of whom came as younger adults. As these people age, they will place an increasing burden on hospitals and the government, which pays for elderly care facillities. Note that the legal-born children of illegal immigrants, who do not show up in the statistics, will be far more expensive to take care of than their parents.
A case study Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker. He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 - all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" - an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently. But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian. The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies."
Bringing in Disease
Many illegal aliens harbor fatal diseases that American medicine fought and vanquished long ago, such as drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue, and Chagas disease."
A report from the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons describes that the spread of diseases brought into the country. Tuberculosis had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin," says the report. "TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later. TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to 'foreign born' people who have up to eight times higher incidences apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam." Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or "kissing bug disease," is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. The disease also infiltrates America's blood supply. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be unknowingly infected. Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico. Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills. Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants as do intestinal parasites, according to the report. Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.
Hawthorne Hospital to Shut Doors
Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center cites financial problems for closure Dec. 31. It marks the loss of the sixth ER in L.A. County this year.
September 24, 2004, Jia-Rui Chong, Los Angeles Times
Robert F. Kennedy Medical Center in Hawthorne announced Thursday that it will shut down Dec. 31, becoming the sixth Los Angeles County emergency room this year to close its doors because of financial problems.
The move will force patients to find another hospital just as the flu season hits and underscores the strain facing the county's teetering emergency medical system.
Officials at nearby hospitals questioned whether their emergency rooms would be able to handle the increased load and worry that patient care could suffer.
"This is really a crisis," said Michael Rembis, chief executive of Centinela Hospital in Inglewood, the nearest hospital. "It won't be possible for hospitals in RFK's immediate vicinity to handle their ER volume."
Centinela already sees about 41,000 patients a year in the emergency room, which often fills up at times during the day, hospital officials said.
Rembis said he expected waiting times to increase, and other nearby hospitals expressed concern that patients could be forced to wait on gurneys in hallways.
RFK Medical Center joins hospitals such as Northridge Hospital Medical Center's Sherman Way Campus in Van Nuys and ELAStar Community Hospital in East Los Angeles to announce closure plans -- largely because of the losses that come with treating uninsured and underinsured patients.
The emergency room at Community Hospital of Gardena also has shut down.
County officials, meanwhile, are debating whether to close the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center, though the emergency room would remain open.
Since the mid-1980s, 18 emergency rooms have closed. Ten trauma centers -- which treat the most critically injured patients -- also have shut their doors. With RFK Medical Center's demise, the county will be left with 79 emergency rooms.
"It becomes a domino effect," said Carol Meyer, the county's head of emergency services. "What happens is those patients seeking emergency care go to the next hospital, which increases their load and potentially delays."
The 229-bed Hawthorne hospital has lost $52 million since January 2002 and was projected to lose another $25 million in 2005, said Larry Stahl, the chief operating officer.
The hospital board decided that the facility was not generating enough business for inpatient services -- such as diabetes care or obstetrics -- that insurance typically covers.
Cutbacks to services for America's elderly, handicapped and in California cutbacks to invalids all the while paying for the baby making machines that ignorantly pump out even more mouths to feed and to their Anchors that continue this stupidity.
I rather suspect the politicians have some sort of an agenda.
It is difficult to believe they could all be ignorant enough to fall for the "multicultural" ideology that the televised news heaps on everyone.
Whether it is cheap labor, lower wages, and destruction of unions for big business interests, or if it is about easy votes for the democratic party, I am not really sure.
But with all these extra impoverished people, one would think it would only be even more difficult to provide universal health coverage to everyone. Democrats do not really care about soaring costs; in their mind the wealthy taxpayers have a potentially unlimited supply of revenue to foot the bill.
"Like education, health care is a government service that has been hit hard by illegal immigration; states such as Arizona and California can no longer afford to educate and provide unlimited medical treatment for illegal immigrants, who do not financially contribute to these government services. Both Arizona and California have incurred enormous budget deficits as a result of unabashed illegal immigration, and the associated drain on governmental agencies, schools, and hospitals.
Another problem is immigrants’ use of hospital and emergency services rather than preventative medical care. For example, utilization rate of hospitals and clinics by illegal aliens (29 percent) is more than twice the rate of the overall U.S. population (11 percent). As a result, the costs of medical care for immigrants are staggering. The estimated cost of unreimbursed medical care in 2004 in California was about $1.4 billion per year. In Texas, the estimated cost was about $8.5 billion, and in Arizona the comparable estimate was $4 billion per year."
"We're running an H.M.O. for illegal immigrants and if we keep it up, we're going to bankrupt the county,” Los Angeles County supervisor Michael D. Antonovich, New York Times, May 21, 2003.
Illegals should not be spared all debt, all responsibilities, all bills.
American citizens end up in life-long debt while illegals have come to expect never to pay a single dime for their health care. Illegals pay no co-pay, no expensive insurance premium, no deductible. It's all one big free for them program.
Illegals should not be spared all debt, all responsibilities, all bills.
I agree.
Of course, if they were here legally, then it would be a lot easier to match debts to particular individuals.
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