Bankrupting Hospitals 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."
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
MDR-TB is the result of incomplete treatment regimens in the US. Other nations did not employ the advanced TB drugs that allowed MDR strains to develop. It was a classic example of the problems that result when public health is underfunded and otherwise restrained by politics concerned more with fiscal restraint and individual freedom than public health concerns. Once these strains crossed the border they became endemic and returned. Dengue and malaria are returning to the US because mosquito eradication and control efforts have been defunded and abandoned due to fiscal restraints caused by tax cuts. They are endemic to the south and have returned because control efforts have relaxed. There is a simple test for Chagas but many for profit blood suppliers do not employ it. There are a lot of diseases endemic to tropical countries that many immigrants come from. Immigration authorities are charged with dealing with them but their efforts to take on this charge have been underfunded for years.
Hospitals that have been bankrupted have done so because of their own inability to keep themselves afloat. There is nothing to do with treating illegals that did it to them. Most hospitals where I live are doing so well, they don't know what to do with all the money they have. They are non-profits, so they keep getting bigger and bigger.
Good topic. Government is driving hospitals into a hole and more government means the hole gets dug deeper and faster. Why do you think government is on a path to get rid of private hospitals?
From the Los Angeles Times -- And that's just Los Angeles. It's happening in more places than you may think.
43.6% of people in Los Angeles speak spanish. In Los Angeles county, 47.7% of the people are hispanic. 27.8% are non-hispanic whites, and only 8.7% are black (the blacks have been displaced frm their low-level jobs in recent years and are fleeing the violence) http://www.vdare.com/walker/080310_gangs.htm Los Angeles has been swamped by large numbers of poor hispanic immigrants in recent decades. The result has been overcrowding and poverty. The hospitals have been going bankrupt because of all the hispanic children that grew up to have low incomes, and thus are uninsured. The Hospitals in Los Angeles (most of which where built in the 1960's before the "white flight") were never designed to deal with so many people, even if they did have enough money to pay their own medical bills.
There is plenty of poor white people in LA who are uninsured and a lot of white people who are underinsured. Pretty much everyone with a job is underinsured and lots of people with crappy jobs have no health insurance at all and not enough income to pay the outrageous hospital bills from emergency care. A stupid thing that hospitals perpetrate is opposition to low priced walk-in non-emergency clinics like what CVS is trying to do and oppositon to free community clinics run by church groups and others. They lobby hard for the local governments to prevent these groups from operating. It is obvious that the hospital emergency room one size fits all model has become grossly overpriced and inefficient in dealing with non-urgent patients, many of whom are low income people who have no or inadequate health insurance and zero alternatives as to where to get care. Many of them could and would pay the small fees that walk in clinics charge but not emergency room bills that are an order of magnitude higher. The hospitals are against these free and low priced clinics because they want to charge as many people as possible a $600 emergency room fee to tell them they have the flu and should stay in bed for a few days when a CVS clinic would do the same for $30-60. The kicker is that the hospitals then complain that they are overwhelmed with non-emergency patients who do not pay them and lobby for greater public funding. If I was in charge of public health care money I would use it to subsidize low priced clinics in poor neighborhoods and areas of low wage work and require hospitals to either establish their own similar clinics adjacent to their emergency rooms or contract for someone else to. I would also require all health insurance providers to require their subscribers to first use low priced clinics for non-emergency care and pay %100 for all critical and urgent emergency care. Only then would I consider the hospitals pleas for more emergency care funding. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy filings in the US is due to medical costs on people that have a health insurance plan. Insurers will not pay all of the bills and most insured cannot afford whatever the insurer does not pay for many serious medical problems. The reason many trauma centers and emergency rooms have closed is because insurers excluded them from the list of approved places to get emergency trauma care because they get discounts at other places. Another reason is that many were part of or branches of non-profit hospitals that have become for profit and the elimination of emergency rooms and trauma centers relieves them from treating indigents. It is easy to blame it all on illegal immigrants but that is not the reality, not even close.
The hospitals are afraid that all people who can afford to do so will seek out cheaper alternatives elsewhere, still leaving the hospitals emergency room having to provide free treatment to the poor. Many poor hispanic families go to the emergency room whenever one of their children has a bad cold, because they cannot afford to see a regular doctor! Often the illegals obtain three sets of paperwork [basic identification]: one to work, one to collect welfare, and a third when they go to the emergency room. In this way, the welfare department does not know that they are working, and the hospital is unable to come after them to collect medical bills. Yes, the hospital wants/needs to collect $600 from the middle class white family who's child scrapped his finger, in order to pay for seeing all those illegal children who's families never pay. Even with the emergency rooms charging exhorbitant ammounts, the hospitals are still losing money because of all the poor hispanic patients. The emergecy room would be much cheaper for the people who actually do pay if the hospitals were not forced to treat all the poor hispanics for free. People are escaping the outrageous costs and long lines by seeking out private "urgent care" facilities. This will only hasten the closure of more hospitals. This phenomena is similar to the middle class fleeing overburdened school districts, in a phenomena known as "white flight", whereby whites have sought to escape excessive taxation which pay for poor minorities in the area. I have no doubt that minority leaders will start complaining about whites "boycotting" the hospitals, leaving the hospitals with fewer sources of revenue to take care of the poor.
So? If hospitals are wasting people's money and squandering public and private resources with an entirely unsustainable model they should either change or close. Once enough hospitals close they will lose their ability to exert control over the market and new entities with new business models that provide care faster and cheaper will come into the market. There was an urgent care facility a few miles from me. It was far faster and cheaper than the local hospital a mile further. It was extremely popular. The hospital bought it out and closed it. Now, instead of spending two hours to get a broken wrist into a cast for $300 it takes 5 hours and costs over $2000. There are plans for a new community funded urgent care facility due to public clamor. The hospital is almost apoplectic in its opposition.
Right on! Premium care, bureaucracy and third payer system is the problem. When I was in Singapore it cost me around 20 dollar equivalent for a minor flu, for seeing a private clinic. They do not have any nationalized central health-care system. All private hospitals are, required, by law to publish their prices to compete. The govt vs private healthcare debate was a false dichotomy. Private healthcare does much better when there is competition, and we cannot just let lobbyist do whatever they want.
For those of you that would like to see universal health care coverage, consider this: the more poor people that are let into the USA, the more difficult, and less plausible, it would be to cover everyone.
Is all the immigration to Britain overburdening the NHS ? Will this put pressure for more privitisation on the National Health Service? http://commonsense.websanon.com/?p=36 http://bnpideas.com/?p=168 The NHS is already slowly being privitised, little by little: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/apr/12/private-sector-involvement-nhs http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/mar/17/health-nhs-reforms-cuts-hospitals http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkin...sed-it-doesnt-matter-what-british-people-want Throw a crab in boiling water and it will immediately jump out. But put it in cold water on the stove, and as the water starts heating up the crab will not notice and it will be cooked alive.
The effect of immigration on hospitals are only about 2% of the cost of the fraud that goes on in medicade and social security. At any rate with the new healthcare, every provider will be paid, no more free-loaders getting by at the ER. Tax payers will filp the bill when insurance companies deny payment. So everything is cool.
On my NICU illegal and legal are both the problem. Why? Because they are both breeding without a pot to p!ss in. They are the cause of their own poverty by breeding into poverty. They all ask for WIC, medicaid, section 8 housing, etc. yet many either have low paying jobs or no job. The problem is irresponsible breeding habits. Period.
California has particularly strict regulations that would affect even hospitals that do not accept medicare. http://www.calpatientguide.org/iv.html Is this even constitutional? Can the state force a private business to provide a service without paying them? Especially when providing this service will create significant legal liability risk?
Hundreds of hospitals have closed since the mid 1980s.. And many, many small hospitals and rural hospitals were bought up and closed by companies like Columbia HCA to drive down competition. They called it "economies of scale"...
Sounds suspiciously like an excuse to be allowed to form regional monopolies and get around anti-trust legislation.
Yeah, it was.. Big stink in Augusta Georgia a few years back..One of the big hospital corporations wound up owning all the hospitals.. The law went after them.. I can't recall the details.
