Thread: Mexican Emergency Rooms - Not Swamped !

http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/23032.html
Mexican Emergency Rooms - Not Swamped !
February 25, 2007 01:00 PM EST



Emergency rooms in American hospitals are being overwhelmed by uninsured patients who don’t pay for medical care, and a significant portion of these patients are illegal aliens.

The complicating factor is a law known as EMTALA (Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985) which forbids emergency rooms from refusing service to anyone, regardless of ability to pay.

This has resulted in ERs being swamped by patients who must be treated for free, including many illegal aliens. And not only illegal alien Mexicans in the U.S. In a brazen display of chutzpah, Mexicans who live on their side of the border are taken by ambulance to hospitals on the U.S. side, where they know they can’t be refused.

So not only does our government refuse to control the border, it also makes hospitals treat illegal aliens for free. Did I say free? I meant free for the aliens, not for the hospitals , some of which are going out of business.

What the government should do is charge the cheap labor profiteers who hire illegals for both medical care and costs of deportation.

So how do they handle this in Mexico?

Well, I’ve been to Mexican emergency rooms a few times - as a visitor, as a parent, and just recently, as a patient myself.

When my elder son was twenty-two months old , he fell and cut his head. So my wife, mother-in-law and I took him in our Volkswagen to a private hospital emergency room. The boy had his noggin stitched up and was as good as new. It wasn’t free though. My wife paid with the credit card before we departed the premises

Just a few months ago, I developed a painful case of colitis, an unpleasant condition I hadn’t even known about until I had it. The pain was so bad my wife took me to the nearest private hospital emergency room, where they hooked me up to an IV (the first time in my life I’d had that experience). They had to pump a lot of painkiller into me, and mix up some kind of potent IV cocktail to finally bring the pain down. Before we left, my wife paid with the credit card. The good thing is, I didn’t have to spend the night , or it would’ve cost more.

No free medical care for this gringo in Mexico . Now if I’d been thinking ahead, I could have tried to make a test case out of it. I could have tried to get emergency medical care for free , on the grounds that Mexicans get free emergency room care in the United States. Somehow though, I don’t think they’d have bought that argument.

Wherever you go, medical care has to be paid for somehow. In
Mexico there are various ways.

Rich Mexicans have any medical care they want, some of them even fly to Houston for it.

Middle class Mexicans can avail themselves of private sector medical care, which is reasonably priced.

Then there are various government-sponsored health insurance plans. The biggest is Seguro Social, which includes all private sector employees in the formal economy. . I’m enrolled, but I’ve never used it. The self-employed and workers in the informal economy aren’t automatically included in Seguro Social but can join the program and make the payments.

For government employees, there’s a different program called ISSSTE, the oil monopoly PEMEX has its health program for employees , the military has its program. In all of these employee-based programs, the employee’s paycheck is deducted to contribute to the fund. So they’re not free to the user either.

For Mexicans without health insurance, there’s a new program called Seguro Popular. To join this program, one must pay for it, except for those under a certain income level, who get it for free.

In addition, there are various medical facilities operated by charities and churches.

Americans residing in Mexico are either gainfully employed or financially independent. So Americans either pay out of pocket for private care, or pay for a Seguro Social policy, or a combination of both. If a foreigner enters the Seguro Social he’d better be ready to have his Mexican immigration papers checked.

The urban area in which I reside has a number of hospitals and clinicsboth public and private. Most ER care is paid for either out of pocket, or by one of the health insurance plans mentioned above. In the case of a car accident, the patient is taken by ambulance to whichever hospital is appropriate for his economic situation. Those who are indigent and can’t pay anything usually wind up at the Red Cross hospital, where if they prove they can’t pay anything, they get free care.

Interestingly enough , there is something superficially similar to EMTALA in Mexican law - Article 36 of the Ley General de Salud . It stipulates that health care providers, public or private, must charge Mexicans in accordance with their socioeconomic level and even exempt them if they are unable to pay. As for foreigners who come to Mexico for the primary purpose of receiving medical treatment (as some do), they must be charged at the full rate, except in cases of emergency.

Nevertheless , Mexican emergency rooms are not being overwhelmed by uninsured patients, as they are in the U.S.A.

Why? One major reason is because Mexican emergency rooms are still emergency rooms. They are only used for emergencies. And physicians , not patients, determine what an emergency is .

In contrast, the EMTALA regime in the U.S.A. will slap a $50,000 fine on a hospital for refusing treatment, even if the attending doctor determined a case was a
non-emergency. That means that, in U.S. emergency rooms, the patient, not the physician, decides what an emergency is. Combine that insane policy with open borders and you’ve got a real disaster on your hands.

When I think of an Emergency Room, I think of victims of car wrecks and things like that . But under EMTALA, the patient decides what an emergency is. So nowadays, “emergencies” also include a cough, a headache, or a hangnail, because the patient says so. Drug and alcohol addictions are considered emergencies. So is a favorite malady known as “permanent disability”, which includes social, mental and personality disorders, ( i.e. it could be almost anything ). It entitles the patient to eligibility for SSI (Supplemental Security Income).

Once again, shouldn’t the employers of illegal aliens be paying for all this ?

Before her death, Dr. Madeline Pelner Cosman summarized the situation under EMTALA : “The definition of emergency is so flexible and vague enough to include almost any condition. Any patient coming to a hospital ED (emergency department) requesting ‘emergency’ must be screened and treated…whether or not insured, ‘documented’ or able to pay… High technology EDs have degenerated into free medical offices. Between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. (Dr. Madeline Pelner Cosman, “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine”, Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, Vol. 10, Number 1 Spring 2005) Here in Mexico, the hospitals don’t put up with such nonsense, and physicians, not patients still call the shots.

Of course, any attempt to change or scrap EMTALA, can be expected to meet howls of protest from the Mexican government and its meddling diplomats.Mexico’s leaders are quite happy to use the emergency rooms in the U.S. to absorb medical costs for Mexican citizens. And our leaders are only to happy to oblige.
But they don’t allow the same insanity in Mexico. So I reckon I won’t be getting free treatment for hangnail anytime soon.

Allan Wall recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq. He currently resides in Mexico, where he has lived since 1991. He can be reached via e-mail at allan39@prodigy.net.mx">allan39@prodigy.net.mx . This article was originally published on the VDARE.COM website, at http://www.vdare.com/awall/070219_memo.htm .

I wish that our Veterans got such great hospital care.