socialized medicine // Current

Immigrants deported by US hospitals

Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.

Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.

“Repatriation is pretty much a death sentence in some of these cases,” said Dr. Steven Larson, an expert on migrant health and an emergency room physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “I’ve seen patients bundled onto the plane and out of the country, and once that person is out of sight, he’s out of mind.”

Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

“What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we’re unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens,” said Alan B. Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona. “A full bed is a full bed.”

Medical repatriations are happening with varying frequency, and varying degrees of patient consent, from state to state and hospital to hospital. No government agency or advocacy group keeps track of these cases, and it is difficult to quantify them.

A few hospitals and consulates offered statistics that provide snapshots of the phenomenon: some 96 immigrants a year repatriated by St. Joseph’s Hospital in Phoenix; 6 to 8 patients a year flown to their homelands from Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; 10 returned to Honduras from Chicago hospitals since early 2007; some 87 medical cases involving Mexican immigrants — and 265 involving people injured crossing the border — handled by the Mexican consulate in San Diego last year, most but not all of which ended in repatriation.

Over all, there is enough traffic to sustain at least one repatriation company, founded six years ago to service this niche — MexCare, based in California but operating nationwide with a “network of 28 hospitals and treatment centers” in Latin America. It bills itself as “an alternative choice for the care of the unfunded Latin American nationals,” promising “significant saving to U.S. hospitals” seeking “to alleviate the financial burden of unpaid services.”

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more on the topic here: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/18/us/18immig.html#Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find... more

smorrisey
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82 responses

4 months ago

America's next great disaster - Socialized Medicine

Let's put this one under the law of unintended consequences. Most of the progressives I know rail against tax breaks for corporations. If the Government nationalizes the healthcare system it would be the largest piece of corporate welfare ever given. If Uncle Sugar is going to cover you why should your employer, union or pension plan continue to pay?

Anyone who wants the government to run the healthcare system has not spent enough time at the DMV. At least with the DMV you can make choices to avoid the government, you can ride the bus or a bike. Maybe that's why the DMV is so gawd awful to force us to go green. With healthcare you got no choice, at some point you have to go to the doctor and then Big Brother has you. The government taking over the health care system would be a blunder almost as grand as George and Dick's Excellent Iraq Adventure and in the long run it would be about 1000 times as expensive.

We have all heard the mantra of the enlightened progressives; free and equal health care for all. Is that the big change Obama is bringing? Giving a Dr. Frankenstein jolt of electricity to the failed policies of Hillary Clinton from the early 90's? Why not, after all he is employing a lot of the same old hacks the Clinton used to employ and now have on their enemies list. Obama has said there is no reason the same package that covers congress shouldn't be available for the general population.

Well friends, it ain't gonna happen. At no time in the future will you or I get free healthcare equal to what your local congressman gets.

At no point will you get that or anything near the same health care Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins get from their exclusive club called the Screen Actors Guild. SAG refuses to allow their peon low-income members access to the same health care system the big boys and girls get. You see if SAG gave access to its healthcare to all its members it would cost so much that the union would have to get a ton more cash from its big earners. As much as the Clooney's and the Penn's of Hollywood pay lip service to helping the little guy they really don't give a big rat's backside when it comes to reaching into their own pockets in anything other than a superficial way.

Let's take Obama's proposal to increase the income tax on the top one percent of earners to almost fifty percent of the earnings plus and extra point or two on money over $250,000 for the social security system. If SAG did the same to its top earners, took fifty percent of all salaries over one million dollars (the Obama government would do it for all earners over $250,000) to provide health care for all SAG members - Robert Redford and Sharon Stone could get by on the four or five million a movie they have left over. Even after the government took their fifty percent of the fifty percent they had left over they could still live a pretty cushy life. But since the actor's union is run by the same fat cats who would have to pony up under this scheme the chances of it happening are about the same as Obama picking Clarence Thomas as his running mate.Let's put this one under the law of unintended consequences. Most of the progressives I know rail against tax breaks for... more