President Bush by his negligence or ignorance is allowing Illegal Aliens to step to the front of the line in the United States Medical System. Emergency Rooms broke or charging legals more.
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Mexican ambulance companies are now instructing their drivers to take http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3073 to uphold.
For each of the last three years, 60 percent of hospitals in New York lost money. State hospitals lost a total of $1.7 billion in uncompensated care. Yet the state is offering free insurance coverage to 167,000 legal immigrants, at a cost of about $10 million. Immigrants head straight to the Jamaica Hospital, in Queens, New York, after landing at JFK or La Guardia. The hospital buys plane tickets and to send some of the ill immigrants back home, sometimes buying extra tickets for nurses to serve as escorts.Pennsylvania and New Jersey hospitals gave almost $2 billion in free emergency and short-term care to uninsured patients, a large portion are illegal aliens.
Chicago’s Alivio Medical Center provides $1 million a year in uncompensated care and estimates that more than half of its 20,000 annual patients are illegal aliens
Minnesota county commissioners say that the cost of medical care for uninsured immigrants is too high for local government to bear without federal help. Minnesota expects a $4.2 billion budget shortfall over the next two years
North Carolina has about $1.4 billion in unreimbursed hospital expenses annually. Every month, a Medicaid emergency services program sees 220 new cases involving immigrants, many of whom are illegal, at a cost of $32 million.
According to the Texas Hospital Association, Texas hospitals spent $393 million treating illegal aliens in 2002 alone and increasing yearly with $225 million to be paid by taxpayers. Texas, facing a $10 billion two-year state budget shortfall, plans to roll back Medicaid and coverage for children under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program to the minimum levels mandated by law. Texas attorney general John Cornyn issued a legal opinion stipulating that federal law bans hospitals from using tax dollars to provide non-emergency care to illegal immigrants. However, Harris County- the state’s largest county, which includes Houston- announced it would ignore the opinion and continue to provide taxpayer-subsidized non-emergency care to illegal aliens. In El Paso, 40 percent of residents have no health insurance and the illegal alien problem is rampant, Thomason General Hospital is seeking a 12.5 percent property tax increase to help offset its uncompensated care costs. The facility lost $32 million in uncompensated costs in 2001, not including an additional $49.7 million in charity care for patients whom the hospital knew up front could not pay their bills. An administrator at Texas’s Brownsville Medical Center estimated that his hospital spends $500,000 a month treating illegal aliens.
In Florida, if Medicaid costs continue to increase at the current rate, the costs would consume the state budget by 2015. Non-citizens amass unpaid bills of more than $40 million a year at Florida hospitals. Broward County collects $190 million annually in property taxes to offset the $453 million lost in uncompensated care. The Florida Hospital Association reports that hospitals in the state “expended considerable time and effort transferring the patient back to their own country or finding appropriate long-term care. Hospitals frequently paid to return the patient to his/her home country and/or absorbed the cost of any follow up care
California Over 60 emergency rooms have closed and locally funded initiatives in Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Francisco, San Mateo, and Riverside counties now pay for health insurance for illegal immigrants in those jurisdictions. One-third of the patients treated by the Los Angeles county health system each year are illegal aliens. Los Angeles, a magnet for legal and illegal immigration, is a prime example of immigration overwhelming a health system. Since the early 1990s, the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services (LACHS) has been on the verge of collapse several times, saved only by bailouts from the federal government. LACHS bears the burden of providing treatment for two million people without health insurance and faces an anticipated $300 million deficit, accumulating to nearly $800 million over the next five years. 16 health clinics and two hospitals were forced to close their doors to everyone
LACHS is sharply curtailing services at dozens of county clinics, hospitals, and emergency rooms, which serve primarily the working poor and indigent. If no additional state or federal funds are forthcoming, county health officials have proposed closing emergency, trauma, and in-patient services at three hospitals, along with two-thirds of the county health center clinics and 100 private outpatient clinics. “If these critical county trauma centers are closed, there is absolutely no doubt that injured people, both with and without medical insurance, will die unnecessarily because the other trauma centers are simply too far away,” says Dr. Robert Hockberger, chair of Harbor-UCLA’s Department of Emergency Medicine
Scripps Memorial Hospital in Chula Vista estimates that about one quarter of patients who are uninsured and don’t pay their bills are illegal aliens. The hospital loses $7 million to $10 million in uncompensated costs.
In Santa Cruz hospitals are so crowded that they regularly close their doors to new emergency patients. When they’re open, patients often have to wait up to ten hours. 30 to 40 percent of the Community Clinic of Orange County’s patients in Santa Ana are illegal immigrants Regional Medical Center and Pioneers Memorial Hospital in El Centro, California loses over $1.5 million annually treating illegal immigrants.
Arizona, facing a $1 billion state budget shortfall in FY 2004 Southeast Arizona Medical Center- has filed for bankruptcy. Cochise’s Copper Queen Community Hospital spends two-thirds of its operating income on uncompensated care for immigrants, a factor administrators say played a role in the hospital’s decision to close its long-term care unit. University Medical Center in Tucson loses over $7 million a year caring for immigrants The five largest health care providers in Maricopa County loses over 400 million every year in uncompensated care.
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