Thread: Hospitals can’t pay for uninsured illegals

Hospitals can’t pay for uninsured illegals
Published: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 11:10 a.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 11:11 a.m.



To The Editor: After caring for Luis Jimenez for six years in an intensive care unit at a cost of $1.5 million, a hospital in Stuart, Fla. leased an air ambulance ($30,000) and forcibly returned him to Guatemala. Jimenez now lies at home in bed in excruciating pain, dying. (New York Times News Service, Aug. 3)

Jimenez’ case is not isolated. Other hospitals have taken similar action on occasion when acute care for an uninsured patient becomes cost prohibitive. In one instance, a hospital attempted to return an American citizen (anchor child) to its parents’ country.

Hospitals cannot survive providing care to rising numbers of uninsured patients. Some hospitals have gone to the extreme measure of simply stabilizing the patient and releasing him, not admitting him as a patient but sending him home.

This tragic situation reveals the myriad problems that arise with unimpeded immigration. From Mexico to Patagonia, natives abandon their own countries to chase the American dream. They are slowly eroding America’s quintessence, its soul. Bush and McCain are weak in measures to tightly seal the border, while Obama and the majority of Democrats in Congress salivate contemplating the millions of potential votes in the masses pouring across the Rio Grande.

Bryan Aleksich
Horse Shoe, NC
http://tinyurl.com/632de8

We aren't a global health care freebie center, anymore than we are a global job service. Our hospitals can't care or cater to every sick, dying, disabled, diseased etc. person on the planet. We can't give every person everything they want, when they want it and how they want it.....just because they got here. It's impossible.

Illegal Immigration ALIPAC Forums-viewtopic-

Illegal Runs Up $1.5M Hospital Bill Then Sues The Hospital! ... here hospital more than $1.5 million to save his life, and his family is now suing the hospital! ...

www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=Forums&f ... c&t=125167 - Cached

Americans have to fight tooth and nail with their insurance companies to get the services they desperately need. Illegals get these for free. We cannot provide free care for the whole world.

Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals

By DEBORAH SONTAG
Published: August 3, 2008

JOLOMCÚ, Guatemala — High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

Shooing away flies and beaming at the tiny, toothless elderly mother who is his sole caregiver, Mr. Jiménez, a knit cap pulled tightly on his head, remains cheerily oblivious that he has come to represent the collision of two deeply flawed American systems, immigration and health care.

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,â€