March 13, 2005
Hey, want to be depressed? The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons) has an article about illegal immigration in their latest issue. It's only available in PDF format, and here's the beginning:
The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences.We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen.
Illegal aliens' stealthy assaults on medicine now must rouse Americans to alert and alarm. Even President Bush describes illegal aliens only as they are seen: strong physical laborers who work hard in undesirable jobs with low wages, who care for their families, and who pursue the American dream.
What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of Americaís finest emergency medical facilities, and caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospitals are closing their doors. "Anchor babies" born to illegal aliens instantly qualify as citizens for welfare benefits and have caused enormous rises in Medicaid costs and stipends under Supplemental Security Income and Disability Income.
...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...
It gets much more depressing.
See this WND article for a summary if you don't want to read the whole PDF.
Posted to Immigration2005a at March 13, 2005 10:41 PM
Comments
While I'm sure Dr. Cosman is well educated and experienced, her article takes a few of the issues discussed and removes them completely out of context, thus misleading all of us.
Welfare eligibility.
Here's the law, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
Immigrants are eligible for TANF on a limited basis.
The passage of welfare reform brought dramatic changes in services for immigrant families. Current law states that families who entered the country before August 22, 1996 may immediately receive services, while those who entered after this date may only receive services once they've been in the United States for five years. In May 2002, the nutrition title in the Farm Bill restored food stamp benefits for all immigrant children (as of October 2003) no matter what their date of entry to the United States.
There's one important caveat to the issue of immigrant eligibility for TANF: under current law, the income of an immigrants sponsor can be deemed to be the immigrants income. Not only does this provision make the radical assumption that a sponsors income is accessible to the immigrant, it also effectively boosts the income of many immigrants, thereby making them ineligible for TANF.
For example, SSI (Supplemental Security Income)
Public Law 104-193, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, permits payment of Social Security benefits to non-citizens living in the United States (U.S.) only if they are lawfully present in this country. The law requires that anyone living in the U.S. who applies for Social Security benefits on or after December 1, 1996, must provide evidence that he or she is a U.S. citizen or U.S. national, or an alien lawfully present in the U.S. as determined by the Attorney General.
As you can plainly see, the law regarding eligibility clearly states any person illegally in the US does NOT qualify for SSI benefits. This came directly from the SSI website.
Nice try.
Additionally, SSI has strict qualifications for deciding if a child or adult qualifies for disability benefits. Here they are.
"Social Security’s definition of disability for adults is different from the definition in other programs. Social Security pays only for total disability. No benefits are payable for partial disability or for short-term disability. This is a strict definition of disability."
Disability under Social Security is based on your inability to work because of a medical condition. We consider you disabled if:
You cannot do work you did before and we decide that you cannot adjust to other work because of a medical condition(s).
Your disability must last or be expected to last for at least a year or result in death.
In addition, annual total family income cannot exceed 36K, you cannot have ANY savings accounts, investments such as stocks, bonds, property, or any other asset which can be easily accessed as a cash resource. If you own more than one car, one of them must have a street value of less than $3000.
Now, on to hospital closures. While the influx of people with no insurance has in impact on hospital budgets, it is but a small part of the issue and does not constitute the main reason.
Case in point. Childrens Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). As the parent of a disabled child, we have spent numerous days at this facility getting our daughter the help she needs. She's not yet 5 years old, but has undergone 19 surgical procedures to correct a rare genetic disorder known as Larsens Syndrome. At this time, she is in her second year of preschool and is advanced beyond other children in her class who are in the first grade and is doing well. She will always be in a wheel chair and will always need government assistance to some degree.
The reason I'm telling all of you about my daughter is to help put things in perspective. When she was born, our insurance tried to force us to go to UCLA Medical Center because they did not have CHLA listed as "in network." UCLA is a fine medical center, if you're an adult. CHLA is just about the only facility in America with the experience to handle this condition. They also handle many conditions that no other hospital can offer. In our time there, we've met families from Central and South America, Australia, and even as far away as Egypt.
It is not illegal immigrants doing us a disservice, it is insurance companies more than anything creating this environment. Our insurance allowed us to take our child to CHLA only after we threatened to sue. We did not actually do it, but it points to how far you have to go to get proper help for your kid.
Because our insurance only contracts services with CHLA, compensation to CHLA by insurance is only partial. We estimate the total to the hospital from our daughters surgeries to be about 1 million. Guess how much the insurance actually paid the hospital. How about 25%.
The hospital tries to make it up through one-time patients such as kids with broken arms, but it tends to fall far short of making up the difference.
I can only speak for the facilities I'm familiar with and my own experiences, but I can almost guarantee I'm not alone in this, and neither are the hospitals.
Also, our governor of California has taken it upon himself to try and fix our budget problems by borrowing billions at high interest rates, and slashing health services to irresponsible levels.
For example, rolling back IHSS (In Home Supportive Services) to minimum wage. In case you're not familiar with IHSS, it is a program whereby care givers and parents (such as my wife) are paid through the state to provide care for the disabled in a private, home environment. California is the only state doing this.
In order to qualify for IHSS, you must first be receiving SSI. Depending where you live in the state determines what your pay rate is. My wife is budgeted 236 hours once a month and is paid $9.00/hr. If it wasn't for IHSS working with parents, it would cost taxpayers $60/hr for a nurse to come into our home and do the exact same job.
Cutting this program back to minimum wage will only increase the burden on taxpayers because health workers will be forced to leave the IHSS program, and it will perpetuate the institutionalization of the disabled, which is exponentially more expensive than the current program. Not to mention demeaning to the patient.
These programs are here for not only anyone who is born with disabilities, but anyone who becomes disabled through accidents, or development of a disease.
As far as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, doesn't everyone have a right to at least basic care? I agree that if hospitals are going to be obligated to care for ER patients whether they can pay for it or not, the government should at least offer some compensation. But placing the blame on patients? How irresponsible.
Does any other country offer this care?
One other question. If 43 million people are unisured (and the number rises every day), but she doesn't know how many illegal aliens are in our country, how can she even suggest they're part of the problem?
The biggest reason for greater numbers of people not having insurance has nothing to with illegal immigrants, and plenty to do with our current job market. Of the 226,000 jobs created this year so far, fully 75% of them were low paying, part time non-benefit jobs.
The Bureau of Labor and Statistics states the following http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm
"Over the year, the number of persons who held more than one job increased
by 432,000 to 7.7 million, not seasonally adjusted. These multiple jobholders
represented 5.5 percent of total employment in February, up from 5.3 percent
a year earlier."
More and more people are working two or more jobs just to stay financially afloat.
"The average workweek for production or nonsupervisory workers on private
nonfarm payrolls was unchanged in February, at 33.7 hours, seasonally adjusted.
The manufacturing workweek declined by 0.2 hour to 40.5 hours, the same level as
in November and December. Manufacturing overtime edged up in February to 4.6"
In other words, more and more jobs are paying at less than 40 Hrs per week, which translates into fewer and fewer jobs offering benefits unless the employee pays a large portion of the cost, with limited access under policy guidelines. This of course makes affording insurance very difficult. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t05.htm
And lets not forget the big Pharma's who charge 30% more for drugs here than anywhere else in the world, while spending nearly twice the budget on advertising as they do on research. And lets also not forget that 2/3 of the entire welfare budget is paid to corporations, not individuals.
If we're going to place blame on causes for sky rocketing health care, lets start with our congressional representatives for allowing large companies to ship our higher paying, salaried jobs with benefits overseas.
For what I have stated above, I can state with absolute certainty, that Dr Cosman is not telling the truth.
This should make us all wonder what else in her article is potentially misleading. - David Eccles
Posted by: deccles at March 14, 2005 04:09 PM
Response to the above post
1.. The children of illegal aliens born in the US are automatically US citizens and potentially eligible for SSI. Probably most people in the US don't know that the US is virtually the only developed country that gives automatic citizenship to children of aliens. In most countries newborns receive the citizenship of their parents.
2. Illegal aliens are eligible for emergency medical care and prenatal care in the US. Illegal aliens have no sponsors so sponsor liability does not apply.
3. Two-thirds of the welfare budget does indeed go to medical providers of all sorts- not just corporations.
4. I think most grass-roots immigration have no love for corporations that outsource jobs and hire illegal aliens. Both outsourcing and high levels of immigration(both legal and illegal) are means of driving down wages and benefits.
Posted by: seelow heights at March 14, 2005 06:48 PM
I should have added: there is nothing in the original post that is inaccurate.
Posted by: seelow heights at March 14, 2005 06:52 PM
deccles: While I'm sure Dr. Cosman is well educated and experienced, her article takes a few of the issues discussed and removes them completely out of context, thus misleading all of us.
Whatever your problems are, illegal immigration doesn't help solve them. Illegal immigration decreases the per capita funding available for legal residents because most illegals don't pay income taxes, but do end up in emergency rooms that are required by law to take them in as patients. One really smart cancer patient flew in from abroad and parked himself in the emergency room of a New York area hospital, where he proceeded to get himself fixed up by some of the finest oncologists around, courtesy of the US taxpayer.
Posted by: Zhang Fei at March 16, 2005 12:34 AM
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150750,00.html
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 (search), 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.
(...)
"We're citizens here. Why should somebody from another country that's here illegally get anything that we can't get? I mean that's dumb, that's not right," said Don Schenck, whose son, Bill, is mentally disabled.
Though the Schencks are uninsured, and considered poor by county standards, his father had to find a way to pay for his Bill's care while thousands of others, in the country illegally, get it for free.
Posted by: seelow heights at March 18, 2005 10:39 AM
