April 24, 2007

Generous: Mexico might pay part of UHC for Mexicans in California!

The San Francisco Chronicle's Tyche Hendricks offers "Mexico's health czar seeks better care for Mexicans in California". The new Felipe Calderon administration is developing a system of universal health care and they want to extend it to their citizens living in California. And, in a wonderful sign of generosity, they might pay part of the bill!

How very, very kind of them. Of course, it might be just a tad kinder if they would encourage their citizens who are here illegally to return home, but baby steps and all.

Mexico's new secretary of health [Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos] visited San Francisco on Monday to learn about the health needs of the millions of Mexican immigrants living in California and to further collaborate with state officials to meet those needs.

...The former hospital chief and medical school director from the state of Guanajuato said he plans to meet every six months with U.S. health officials and Mexican immigrant communities to create a basic health care plan to cover Mexicans in the United States and eventually extend to them a system of universal health care that is being developed by the Calderon administration...

...Cordova's visit this early in the Calderon administration means Mexico may intend to share the health care burden, said [Mario Gutierrez, director of rural health programs at the California Endowment], whose foundation is trying to help craft a basic health insurance policy for Mexican immigrants whereby each worker would pay for insurance jointly with his or her employer and the Mexican government...

...Cordova countered [criticisms that Mexico is always trying to rip us off] that both countries are responsible and that U.S. employers who hire Mexican workers also should provide them health coverage.

"The responsibility is shared. They're here but they're ours. Right now, the care is insufficient," Cordova said.

Later on, Gutierrez utters cheap labor pimp-style comments, with scare tactics provided by "Xochitl Castaneda, director of the Health Initiative of the Americas, a project of the California Policy Research Center in the office of the UC president".

Posted to California at April 24, 2007 01:27 PM