Thread: CA-Illegal immigrants don’t overuse emergency room

Originally Posted by lateone

As someone who worked in LA County hospitals for over 10 years, I can say without a doubt that the author of this article is either a paid schill of the RNC or a crackhead.

The problem is alot more endemic than that. Newspapers are ran by "grey haired" hippies who long for the good old days when they could run a story on the bombing of Cambodia or get a "scoop" on the activities of Richard Nixon. New journalism graduates do not get paid very well and the only way to advance in the profession is to write stories that will get the notice of the bosses: stories about poor, oppressed Latinos; people hate Obama because of his race; "white supremacists" don't want bright young Mexicans to do well in school and compete against dumb "racist" white people. And on and on. That is why every article is the same. Newspaper reporters get to play it safe (and keep their jobs) when they "hate America". That is why all over the US some low paid intern at a weekly coupon shopper in some small town is "just starting out" by covering the oppression "of the undocumented migrants" who clean our toilets and watch our children. They are trying to build up a portfolio so they can move to a larger town and sit on the newsdesk covering "the advance of right-wing conservativism" and the "increase in hate crimes against Latinos".

We don't have freedom of speech anymore. We only have freedom of speech for aging hippie fascists. It's no wonder the liberals in congress want to see the fairness doctrine applied against the Internet and blogs. They are destroying the country and they know it. They just don't want us to know it.

http://www.davidrisley.com/2008/08/12/f ... -bloggers/

Fairness Doctrine Apply To Bloggers?

Some very cryptic words came out of the mouth of the FCC Commissioner today. Those words were “[b]government dictating content policyâ€

I once drove myself to an ER in Alexandria VA with a fever of 104. One of the main points I remember of the paperwork I had to fill out was what sort of religious adviser I wanted. Meanwhile, I could not get checked in as the people checking in at the desk didn't speak English and no one could figure out what they spoke. By the time I finally got through the whole procedure the fever had gone up to 106. Thank goodness I did get some emergency treatment, though I still feel that those folks were there for something as simple as a hangnail.

[quote]“San Diego and Baja California have the potential to become a global showcase for how two nations can collaborate,â€

L.A. Emergency Rooms Full of Illegal Immigrants
Friday, March 18, 2005
FOXNews.com
LOS ANGELES —

This is part three of a five-part series looking at how illegal immigration affects U.S. border security, the criminal, health care and education systems, as well as the economy. Watch the series this week on FOX News Channel.

Overburdened by the uninsured and overwhelmed by illegal immigration (search), public health care in Los Angeles is on life support.

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.

"The hospitals are closing because of the totality of the uninsured," said Dr. Thomas Garthwaite, director of the Los Angeles County Health Department (search). "If you're legally a resident in California and you're poor, you have a right to basic services."

But some critics say the taxpayers can't be the HMO (search) to the world. Last year, Los Angeles County spent $340 million to treat the uninsured; that's roughly $1,000 for every taxpayer.

"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.

"It makes you feel pretty bad when you're born in that country and you're handicapped and you've got a learning disability and you can't get medical," Schenck said.

Mike Antonovich, the Los Angeles County supervisor, said the system has been "basically bankrupted."

The Department of Health has a $1.2 billion deficit. Caring for illegals is siphoning money from other services and forcing clinics, trauma centers and emergency rooms to close, he said.

"We cannot afford to have a open-door policy to encourage illegals to continue to come here and receive all the medical care, because it's too expensive," he said.

Immigrants like Yolanda Hernandez, however, argue that if there were cheap insurance plans available to her community, people would buy them.

"[Americans] have enough money to pay for insurance," she said. "They make good money and are educated. Unfortunately, we are not."

The fourth installment of this series focuses on how border states are dealing with educating Mexican immigrants and the strain it's putting on California's education system. Look for it on FOX News and FOX News.com.

Click on the video box above for a complete report by FOX News' William LaJeunesse.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,150750,00.html

For example, among men ages 18-40 – the age group most likely to commit crime – the U.S.-born are 10 times more likely than the foreign-born to be in jail or prison. Even among noncitizen men from Mexico ages 18-40 – a group disproportionately likely to have entered the United States illegally – the authors find very low rates of institutionalization.

That's because many of them are turned over to immigration authorities prior to actual incarceration. Furthermore, some of them disappear while on bail and assume another alias. The folks that spout this mess must really think we're stupid.

West J Med. 1996 March; 164(3): 212–216.
Survey of illegal immigrants seen in an emergency department.
T C Chan, S J Krishel, K J Bramwell, and R F Clark
Department of Emergency Medicine, University of California, San Diego, Medical Center 92103, USA

Abstract

There is growing controversy regarding illegal immigrants and their use of social services, including health care, in this country. We surveyed undocumented persons presenting at our emergency department to investigate the reasons why they sought care in the United States. Overall, 227 visits (8.6%) were made in the emergency department by illegal immigrants, mostly Hispanics. Of 104 patients surveyed, all sought care in this country because they were here at the time, and 86 (83%) intended to remain permanently. Of the 104 persons, 83 (80%) cited lack of funding as a reason for seeking emergency department care. Undocumented Hispanics had a higher uninsured rate (64%) than both Hispanics (32%) and non-Hispanics (30%). Of the 104 patients, 38 (36%) had difficulty obtaining care elsewhere because of their status, 53 (51%) knew of no other sources of care, and 46 (44%) said that even if available, only the emergency department was acceptable. Many undocumented persons seek care in the United States because they reside here permanently, often using this emergency department as their source of care. These findings may be important in light of recent efforts to restrict services for this group.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=1303412

This is exactly why I vote NO everytime our local hospital wants to make "improvements" or do earthquake retro fitting by raising our property taxes. I refuse to support our hospitals any longer until they stop giving illegals free care.

I'm so tired of paying for them.

What a crock....we are not that stupid!

As of February 2007, 12 percent of the state’s 6.6 million Medi-Cal eligible patients were considered illegal immigrants. Medi-Cal officials count as illegal immigrants people who can provide neither a Social Security number nor immigration papers.

IMO, 12% is a high number considering the fact that we're only supposed to have 12 million illegals in the country (of course we all know 12 million is a bogus number). Plus, how many of these folks are providing forged documents and/or a fake SSN?

Medi-Cal is supposedly financed equally by the State and federal government, while Medicare is financed by the federal government. Question, why does California have Medi-Cal and what makes it different from Medicare (coverage wise)?

Do you guys remember this story:

INVASION USA
Illegal aliens threaten
U.S. medical system
Docs journal reports hospitals being closed,
previously vanquished diseases being spread

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: March 13, 2005
1:00 am Eastern

© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com

Cristobal Silverio emigrated illegally from Mexico to Stockton, Calif., in 1997 to work as a fruit picker.

He brought with him his wife, Felipa, and three children, 19, 12 and 8 – all illegals. When Felipa gave birth to her fourth child, daughter Flor, the family had what is referred to as an "anchor baby" – an American citizen by birth who provided the entire Silverio clan a ticket to remain in the U.S. permanently.


But Flor was born premature, spent three months in the neonatal incubator and cost the San Joaquin Hospital more than $300,000. Meanwhile, oldest daughter Lourdes married an illegal alien gave birth to a daughter, too. Her name is Esmeralda. And Felipa had yet another child, Cristian.

The two Silverio anchor babies generate $1,000 per month in public welfare funding for the family. Flor gets $600 a month for asthma. Healthy Cristian gets $400. While the Silverios earned $18,000 last year picking fruit, they picked up another $12,000 for their two "anchor babies."

While President Bush says the U.S. needs more "cheap labor" from south of the border to do jobs Americans aren't willing to do, the case of the Silverios shows there are indeed uncalculated costs involved in the importation of such labor – public support and uninsured medical costs.

In fact, the increasing number of illegal aliens coming into the United States is forcing the closure of hospitals, spreading previously vanquished diseases and threatening to destroy America's prized health-care system, says a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.

"The influx of illegal aliens has serious hidden medical consequences," writes Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of the report. "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."

According to her study, 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbur systemsed tax on the.

"Anchor babies," the author writes, "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."

In addition, the report says, "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."

While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, the report estimates that at least 25 percent of those are illegal immigrants. The figure could be as high as 50 percent.

Not being insured does not mean they don't get medical care.

Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.

"Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency," says the report. "But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."

According to the report, between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals verge on closure, the author writes.

"American hospitals welcome 'anchor babies,'" says the report. "Illegal alien women come to the hospital in labor and drop their little anchors, each of whom pulls its illegal alien mother, father, and siblings into permanent residency simply by being born within our borders. Anchor babies are citizens, and instantly qualify for public welfare aid: Between 300,000 and 350,000 anchor babies annually become citizens because of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and the State wherein they reside."

Among the organizations directing illegal aliens into America's medical systems, according to the report, are the Ford Foundation-funded Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the American Bar Association's Commission on Immigration Policy, Practice, and Pro Bono, the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, the National Council of La Raza, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Migration Policy Institute, the National Network for Immigration and Refugee Rights and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Because drug addiction and alcoholism are classified as diseases and disabilities, the fiscal toll on the health-care system rises.

When Linda Torres was arrested in Bakersfield, Calif., with about $8,500 in small bills in a sack, the police originally thought it was stolen money, explained the report. It was her Social Security lump sum for her disability -- heroin addiction.

"Today, legal immigrants must demonstrate that they are free of communicable diseases and drug addiction to qualify for lawful permanent residency green cards," writes Cosman, a medical lawyer, who formerly taught medical students at the City University of New York. "Illegal aliens simply cross our borders medically unexamined, hiding in their bodies any number of communicable diseases."

Many illegals entering this country have tuberculosis, according to the report.

"That disease had largely disappeared from America, thanks to excellent hygiene and powerful modern drugs such as isoniazid and rifampin," says the report. "TB's swift, deadly return now is lethal for about 60 percent of those infected because of new Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis. Until recently MDR-TB was endemic to Mexico. This Mycobacterium tuberculosis is resistant to at least two major anti-tubercular drugs. Ordinary TB usually is cured in six months with four drugs that cost about $2,000. MDR-TB takes 24 months with many expensive drugs that cost around $250,000 with toxic side effects. Each illegal with MDR-TB coughs and infects 10 to 30 people, who will not show symptoms immediately. Latent disease explodes later.

TB was virtually absent in Virginia until in 2002, when it spiked a 17 percent increase, but Prince William County, just south of Washington, D.C., had a much larger rise of 188 percent. Public health officials blamed immigrants. In 2001 the Indiana School of Medicine studied an outbreak of MDR-TB, and traced it to Mexican illegal aliens. The Queens, New York, health department attributed 81 percent of new TB cases in 2001 to immigrants. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ascribed 42 percent of all new TB cases to 'foreign born' people who have up to eight times higher incidences apparently, 66 percent of all TB cases coming to America originate in Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam."

Other health threats from illegals include, according to the report:

Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis or "kissing bug disease," is transmitted by the reduviid bug, which prefers to bite the lips and face. The protozoan parasite that it carries, Trypanosoma cruzi, infects 18 million people annually in Latin America and causes 50,000 deaths. The disease also infiltrates America's blood supply. Chagas affects blood transfusions and transplanted organs. No cure exists. Hundreds of blood recipients may be silently infected.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen's disease, was so rare in America that in 40 years only 900 people were afflicted. Suddenly, in the past three years America has more than 7,000 cases of leprosy. Leprosy now is endemic to northeastern states because illegal aliens and other immigrants brought leprosy from India, Brazil, the Caribbean and Mexico.
Dengue fever is exceptionally rare in America, though common in Ecuador, Peru, Vietnam, Thailand, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Mexico. Recently, according to the report, there was a virulent outbreak of dengue fever in Webb County, Texas, which borders Mexico. Though dengue is usually not a fatal disease, dengue hemorrhagic fever routinely kills.

Polio was eradicated from America, but now reappears in illegal immigrants as do intestinal parasites, says the report.
Malaria was obliterated, but now is re-emerging in Texas.
The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons report includes a strong prescription for protecting the health of Americans:

Closing America's borders with fences, high-tech security devices and troops.
Rescinding the U.S. citizenship of "anchor babies."
Punishing the aiding and abetting of illegal aliens as a crime.
An end to amnesty programs.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/artic ... E_ID=43275