Thread: Mayor: Immigrants Would Overwhelm Health Care System

Mayor: Immigrants would overwhelm health care system
By KENT JACKSON (Staff Writer)
Published: October 2, 2009

Offering health insurance to legal immigrants, as the president proposes, will lead to more immigration and more strain on health providers, Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta said.

"Imagine how many will come to American if they can get free health care. It will break the American health care system," Barletta, noted for supporting measures to drive illegal immigrants from Hazleton, said when asked about the president's remarks.

President Barack Obama paired health care and immigration in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute on Sept. 16.

While saying illegal immigrants will not be covered under his plan, the president said he strongly supported health insurance coverage for legal immigrants, who currently must wait five years for coverage under federal health insurance such as Medicaid.

Obama also suggested providing a way for illegal immigrants to gain legal status.

"If anything, this debate underscores the necessity of passing comprehensive immigration reform and resolving the issue of 12 million undocumented people living and working in this country once and for all," the president said.

Federal law currently requires hospitals to provide emergency care for anyone, regardless of immigration status, Michelle Mittelstadt, spokeswoman for the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote in an e-mail.

Barletta said illegal immigrants, therefore, use emergency rooms for "anything from a hangnail to a heart attack." Providing care to the uninsured hurts the finances of hospitals and can push the burden of payment onto taxpayers through higher prices for their insurance, he said.

Hazleton General Hospital doesn't ask about immigration status when a patient needs care, its chief executive officer said.

"We're here to take care of everyone, especially in the emergency room. We're going to make sure they get great care," said CEO Jim Edwards.

The Greater Hazleton Health Alliance that includes Hazleton General provided $4,916,000 in uncompensated care last year.

Edwards said the president and Congress might make changes so the hospital would receive compensation for some of the care it now provides for free.

From what he has read, however, the reimbursement for charity care might come from reducing payments that doctors and hospitals get for treating other patients.

"It doesn't really solve the problems," Edwards said. "There have to be new monies available to pay for the care."

Congress and the president worked on health care reform all summer, but haven't settled on a plan. Immigration bills probably won't come before Congress this year.

On Sept. 10 when Obama told a joint session of Congress that he wouldn't subsidize care for illegal immigrants, U.S. Joseph Wilson, R-S.C., yelled: "You lie."

While the House rebuked Wilson for how he behaved, CBS News Correspondent Declan McCullogh concluded that Wilson had a point. Although the Democratic reform bill doesn't specifically provide care to illegal immigrants, the Democrats twice voted against requiring people to verify their immigration status before obtaining health coverage through the plan, McCullogh wrote on his blog.

Whether the federal government will provide a health insurance plan to compete with private insurers remains unsettled. A Senate panel voted against a government option on Tuesday, but House bills retain the option.

While estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States vary from 12 million that Obama used to a figure of 20 million that Barletta quoted, the pace of immigration slackened recently.

Foreign-born residents, including naturalized citizens, declined to 12.5 percent from 12.6 of the total American population last year, the New York Post reported on Sept. 26. It was the first drop in decades, reflecting a slowdown in immigration and an uptick in people leaving the country. The article cited the recession, job losses and border enforcement as possible reasons for the change.

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Foreign-born residents, including naturalized citizens, declined to 12.5 percent from 12.6 of the total American population last year, the New York Post reported on Sept. 26. It was the first drop in decades, reflecting a slowdown in immigration and an uptick in people leaving the country. The article cited the recession, job losses and border enforcement as possible reasons for the change.

LEGAL immigrants are leaving while millions of illegal aliens with little education, skills and morals keep pouring in and reproducing. Something is definitely wrong with this picture!

Barletta: Illegals threaten to deluge health care system
By KENT JACKSON (Staff Writer)
Published: October 3, 2009

In three years as a crusader against illegal immigration, Mayor Lou Barletta has welcomed people to come to Hazleton legally - a distinction that he didn't want an article in Friday's edition of the Standard-Speaker to blur.

The article gave Barletta's views on how changing federal health policy might affect immigration.

When the article quoted Barletta as saying, "Imagine how many will come to America if they can get free health care. It will break the American health care system," it failed to clarify that he was speaking about illegal immigrants.

The article also paraphrased him incorrectly as saying that federal health benefits offered to legal immigrants would lead to more immigration. He actually said offering federal benefits to illegal immigrants would lead to more illegal immigration.

Barletta didn't want the article to undermine the outreach to new groups in the community.

"I don't want to go backwards. I think we're making progress in Hazleton," he said Friday. "I don't want them to think I'm against immigration. I'm for legal immigration. We have to be very careful not to confuse those who are here legally and those who are here illegally."

Twelve million undocumented immigrants are living in the nation, President Barack Obama said Sept. 16 in a speech to the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute.

Obama said he didn't think that the nation can provide them with health insurance, but the debate about health insurance underscores the need to resolve their status.

Asked to comment on the president's speech, Barletta said offering health insurance to illegal immigrants would act like a magnet, drawing more illegal immigration.

Illegal immigration impacts most severely on legal immigrants, people whom Barletta said waited their turn and followed the rules for settling in the United States.

"They're competing for the same jobs," said Barletta, adding that many illegal immigrants aren't paying taxes that legal residents pay.

Barletta also disfavors the president's proposal to create a federal insurance program as an option to private insurance.

He agrees, however, with the president's recommendation to allow legal immigrants access to federal health plans such as Medicare. Currently, legal immigrants have to live five years in the United States before qualifying for those programs.

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