Thread: 2 Billion Spent Annually For Medicaid Emergencies, Most For Illegal Baby Deliveries

Report: $2 billion spent annually for Medicaid emergencies, largely for illegal immigrant baby deliveries

1:52 AM 02/15/2013

In this Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 photo, Carmelita Alejandria of the Philippines receives a dialysis treatment at University Medical Center in Las Vegas. Because of her immigrant status, Alejandria receives her dialysis through emergency care rather than going to a dialysis center. (AP Photo/Laura Rauch)

Even though federal law largely bars illegal immigrants from obtaining Medicaid coverage, the program annually pays out more than $2 billion in free emergency coverage that mostly goes to illegal immigrants, according to Kaiser Health News.
The vast majority of the total emergency care reimbursements cover delivering babies, Kaiser reports.
Based on a Kaiser data analysis of the states believed to have the greatest populations of illegal immigrants — including California, New York, Texas, North Carolina, Arizona, Illinois and Florida — more than 100,000 people annually receive emergency care that is reimbursed by Medicaid.
California, Kaiser’s analysis showed, receives approximately half of the annual $2 billion Medicaid expenditure category.
That category of Medicaid also covers some homeless people and legal immigrants who have been in the country less than five years — and are therefore mostly ineligible for Medicaid, according to Kaiser.
“We can’t turn them away,” Joanne Aquilina, the chief financial officer of Bethesda Healthcare System in Boynton Beach, Fla., told Kaiser.
Nearly one-third of Bethesda Hospital East’s annual 2,900 births are paid for by emergency Medicaid funding.
According to a 2007 Journal of the American Medical Association report, an analysis of claims reimbursed by Emergency Medicaid over a four-year period in North Carolina revealed that 99 percent of the 48,391 individual cases went toward services for illegal immigrants.
Kaiser reports that hospitals generally realize when patients are illegal immigrants, even though they do not explicitly ask them their status, because they do not possess a Social Security Number, birth certificate or other documents.
“We gather information to qualify patients for something and through that process, if you really hit a dead end, you know they are illegal,” Steve Short, the chief financial officer at Tampa General Hospital, told Kaiser.



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I sat in the waiting room in a local hospital with my husband while he was recovering after 2 strokes. I witnessed a family talking to someone from the hospital telling them a story about how their father came from Mexico and it cost the family a lot of money to get him here so he could have the surgery he needed. I later found out it was a social worker they were talking to. They answered no... he had no insurance..it peaked my interest..I listened to them say how he would return to Mexico after surgery. The social worker told them he should be ok to travel by them..but it may require more time until the Dr. would release him as it was a major surgery. I sat there thinking "I have insurance and am sitting here wondering how we will pay the deductibles and wondering what we will do for healthcare when my husband looses his job as he will be permanetly disabled. Here this family has money to bring their father from Mexico illegally (where he could of probably gotten the care he needed with the money they spent to bring him here) But he comes here to recieve care and will return to Mexico and we are all paying for it in our High insurance premiums. I sat wondering if in fact American citizens are considered second class citizens in this country. Obviously we are not on the top of the list..