Um they make up 8% of the births in this country and they do not have $8,800 to pay for it so you figure it out.
@USDJPY, could you please stop private messaging me with personal attacks? I did not invite you to Pm me. Thanks PM sent: "Sorry but I come from a family of OBGYNs. You sir are full of sh*t. Push your propaganda elsewhere."
I thought your family is full of doctors and you made the insinuation that illegal immigrants are a cost to the health care system. Care to explain then how it works? Again if your dad chooses to treat someone for free then that is his choice. If he however passes the cost on to someone else, including insurance companies or other government agencies then it should be your dad that gets jailed, not the immigrant.
So you just make wild accusations but cant back them up. I stick to my point in saying certain services and industry must be regulated, heavily regulated in every developed country. Even in pure market economies. That is financial services, the utility sector, and health care. Every doctor should get paid the same dollar amount for the same service rendered. Each doctor can then choose how much he wants to work. Insurance companies pay out that very same amount. Government actuaries assess the cost of a specific society and compute required insurance premiums to cover such cost and include a hair cut for the insurance company services. Problem fixed. Low health insurance for everyone, no more rogue hospitals and doctors who charge an arm and a leg for services. People who want to be filthy rich would then not study medicine anymore but finance or whatever. Voila, the quality of medical treatment will go up a lot because only those with a willingness and conviction to heal and treat will practice medicine.
Illegal Immigrants Get Public Health Care, Despite Federal Policy Although Affordable Care Act provides them no insurance, 20 big counties treat them anyway Dr. César Palacios is executive director of Proyecto Salud, one of the clinics in Montgomery County, Md., that provides health care to immigrants. PHOTO: STEPHEN VOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL By LOUISE RADNOFSKY March 24, 2016 4:08 p.m. ET 976 COMMENTS WHEATON, Md.—When federal lawmakers wrote the act overhauling the nation’s health-care system six years ago, they ruled out any possibility of extending health insurance to illegal immigrants. Local officials where many of those immigrants live are treating them anyway. A Wall Street Journal survey of the 25 U.S. counties with the largest unauthorized immigrant populations found that 20 of them have programs that pay for the low-income uninsured to have doctor visits, shots, prescription drugs, lab tests and surgeries at local providers. The services usually are inexpensive or free to participants, who must prove they live in the county but are told their immigration status doesn’t matter. Whether such programs are appropriate is a matter of debate. Many voters believe it is unfair to use tax dollars to help immigrants when American citizens struggle, and that doing so encourages illegal immigration. At the same time, American hospitals have long been required by law to screen and stabilize any patient, regardless of his or her ability to pay, which means taxpayers already are committed to paying for care in its most expensive setting. [object Object] County politicians figure it is cheaper, safer and easier to give basic health services to immigrants who can’t get insurance than to treat them only in the county’s emergency rooms. “If federal programs exclude people who live here and get sick here, then someone has to care for them,” says George Leventhal, a Democratic council member who a decade ago started a local initiative to provide care to uninsured immigrants here in Montgomery County, Md., a suburb of Washington. “We all pay anyway.” Local critics contend the county should support immigration enforcement rather than undermine it. Brad Botwin, a local opponent of illegal immigration, objects to the cost of the county health program. “They can’t fix the roads. The metro system is absolutely falling apart. But they have the money to put up these health benefits,” he says. Republican and Democratic federal lawmakers alike agree with the Affordable Care Act’s prohibition against providing government-subsidized insurance to anyone who cannot prove a legal immigration status. The presidential candidates also are in agreement. The Republican candidates also advocate overturning the entire system created by the health law, along with stepping up immigration enforcement. Unauthorized immigrants account for at least one-quarter of the approximately 30 million uninsured people in the U.S., the Congressional Budget Office estimates. Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant rights group, says programs to treat them are an example of people acting locally, despite Washington’s stance. “We may not have gotten federal legislative immigration reform, but I can tell you we are getting immigration reform from the ground up,” she told health-law supporters at a recent conference. For communities that provide care to illegal immigrants, the financial commitment is significant. Interviews with officials in the 25 counties indicated that local initiatives provide nonemergency care for at least 750,000 unauthorized immigrants across those counties, costing them more than $1 billion a year—almost all from local funds. Some of the programs have operated for decades, providing services for immigrants alongside other low-income county residents. Others are brand new and explicitly exist for immigrants. All essentially serve as substitute health plans for illegal immigrants who are prohibited from getting Medicaid or subsidized private insurance under the health law, and whose jobs generally pay too little for them to buy coverage. Montgomery County paid about $12 million for health care for almost 25,000 immigrants last fiscal year across a dozen clinics. One of them was Proyecto Salud, or Project Health, housed in a government building in Wheaton close to a metro station, fast-food franchises and an apartment complex. The health centers put together treatment plans for diabetes, orthopedic injuries and anxiety disorders, among other things. Their budgets rely on donated help from area specialists, hospitals and drug companies, along with modest patient contributions. Past government evaluations of the centers credited them with a 41% reduction of behavioral-health emergency-room visits and a 67% reduction in trips related to chronic conditions—a big incentive for local hospitals to contribute, officials say. “We are saving money to the system by doing this,” says César Palacios, head of Proyecto Salud. “If we don’t pay now when it is easy money, we are going to pay later on.” The county’s program, “Montgomery Cares,” has served mostly immigrants without legal status since the biggest provisions of the health law kicked in two years ago. There were 110,000 uninsured people in the county at that time. At least 50,000 were set to remain uninsured because of the health law’s restrictions on unauthorized immigrants getting Medicaid or subsidized private coverage. In New York City, the public-hospital system estimates it provided nonemergency care last year to 208,000 unauthorized immigrants across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, the boroughs with the largest populations of such immigrants. The cost was about $400 million, picked up by the system—essentially, local taxpayers and everyone who has insurance and uses the hospital system. In Los Angeles, 135,000 low-income county residents without legal U.S. residency status are assigned primary-care providers in a “medical home” designed to coordinate their care. They get an ID card, use of a member-services hotline and a booklet akin to an insurance brochure that explains how to gain access to screenings, a clinic network for specialty care and prescription drugs. In the past year, the number of California counties with programs akin to the Los Angeles one has jumped from nine to 48, in part because of the entry of a consortium of rural counties. The debate is playing out county by county across other big states, including Texas. For decades, state officials there have wrangled over whether counties should treat uninsured illegal immigrants, without reaching a firm decision. As a result, local leaders have gone their own way. Health-care professionals, working with translators, examine patients at Proyecto Salud in Montgomery County, Md.PHOTOS: STEPHEN VOSS FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Houston and Dallas together cover tens of thousands of illegal immigrants in charity-care programs—65,000 in Houston, and some portion of an 115,000-person program in Dallas, where the county doesn’t track immigration status. “Consider the implications of half the people on the [local] rail lines and buses carrying them to work being denied flu shots,” says Clay Jenkins, the chief elected official for Dallas County. “There are 2.5 million people that live here, and they’re all important and they’re all deserving of respect and medical care,” says Mr. Jenkins, a Democrat. By contrast, in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the system that provides safety-net care is limited to residents who can prove legal immigration status. Those restrictions have been in place for about a decade. “At that time, there was a tremendous discussion that occurred,” says G.K. Maenius, the county administrator. “Our hospital district was struggling to have the finances to take care of legal residents of Tarrant County.” As a result, he says, the hospital district opted to treat people without legal status as if they lived in any other county. The emergency room treats everyone. For noncounty residents to obtain nonemergency treatment, they have to pay for it—at prices that likely are prohibitive for most. In Fresno County, Calif., a debate over accepting $5.5 million the state said could only be used to provide specialty care for around 5,000 unauthorized immigrants split the board of supervisors 3-2. The county ended up taking the money. Andreas Borgeas was one of the supervisors to vote “no.” He says his opposition is chiefly fiscal. “We have distorted the discussion and created an ongoing entitlement that’s going to be difficult to sustain,” he says. “If California wants to have this coverage, it should be by Sacramento.” California, like many states, doesn’t have an ironclad prohibition on providing health care to people here without authorization. States have flexibility over Medicaid eligibility, and 16 of them allow the program to cover populations of illegal immigrants, such as children and pregnant women. California and New York have some of the broadest inclusion criteria. Oklahoma has a pregnant-women’s program aimed at ensuring prenatal care for babies who will become U.S. citizens, named “Soon to be Sooners.” States would struggle to find the money to insure all immigrants, even if they wanted to. California will have around 1.5 million adult immigrant residents without insurance in 2019. To offer Medicaid to those who meet the program’s low-income criteria, the state likely would have to find at least $400 million more a year, according to an estimate by the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education that is based on the assumption that not everyone would enroll. If everyone did, the price would likely grow to at least $720 million. Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton have said they want to see universal health coverage in the U.S., but that they favor the status quo on the health law’s immigration restrictions. They have said they would be willing for illegal immigrants to use HealthCare.gov as a tool to shop for coverage, but wouldn’t want the federal government to help pay for premiums or allow them to enroll in Medicaid. The Republican front-runner has made tighter immigration restrictions a core part of his health plan. “If we were to simply enforce the current immigration laws and restrict the unbridled granting of visas to this country, we could relieve health-care cost pressures on state and local governments,” Donald Trump said in his health-policy platform. Obama administration officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell, acknowledge that immigration status is a key factor in the size of the U.S. uninsured population, and that reducing that number to zero would require changes in immigration policy. But even those changes likely wouldn’t resolve the health-coverage issue. The Obama administration has said that children granted immigration-enforcement reprieves under a 2012 executive action still will be subject to the health law’s restrictions. After an executive action that would extend that reprieve to around four million adults, the Obama administration said it would continue to subject them to the restrictions, too. That action is now before the Supreme Court, with arguments in mid-April. Write to Louise Radnofsky at louise.radnofsky@wsj.com
"Their budgets rely on donated help from area specialists, hospitals and drug companies." From your article. It also mentioned that treating them early on is way cheaper than treating them when they have to come to an emergency room. Any what is your real issue? The debate started about a fairer system for all, and I proposed a social market economic model such as Germany or the ones in Scandinavian countries. After that you went ape on me and claimed illegal immigrants are fucking it all up for you people. No, your system is fucking it all up for you. Your legal system and crazy law suits, your winner takes all capitalistic model that leaves no margin for error, your gun laws that kill more people each year than anything else, your lobby system where everyone and anything can be bought via lobbyists. That is what is fucking up your country, not a few illegal immigrants. But if you mind so much well you apparently voted for Trump, so he should soon follow up on his Pledges to deport all illegal immigrants. Bm
First of all, I didn't vote because I didn't like either candidate's message sufficiently. But my point was that Mexico should pay for the free healthcare provided to its citizens who have established themselves here illegally. Think of it as part of the balance of trade between the two countries. You tried to negate that point by saying that illegal migrants do not receive free healthcare. Then you asked me to prove it and claimed I had no evidence (saying I was making things up). I proved it, and showed you are misinformed on the issue (or making things up) as it pertains to domestic healthcare issues and illegal immigration in the United States. I ask you to drop this debate because it is over.
It also says they are eligible for free orthopedic surgery which costs between $40,000 - $50,000 in the USA. This can be a disaster for American families with high deductibles.