ANYONE SEE A CONNECTION BETWEEN THEse ARTICLES AND THE LAST ONE AT THE BOTTOM?????

Illegal Immigrants Seek Health Care for Kids

By MIGUEL MARQUEZ
LOS ANGELES, June 24, 2007
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Share Going to the doctor when you are a kid can be a pretty frightening experience. For millions of families in the United States illegally, the bigger concern is often being able to see a doctor at all.

Take a look at one case: Sergio is a shy and slightly awkward 13 year old. He's been in the United States since he was a baby, but because he wasn't born here he is illegal.

Sergio was diagnosed with asthma when he was an infant. At that time, the only option his family had for healthcare was to take Sergio to the nearest emergency room.

"Every time he got sick, it was expensive," says Sergio's mother Maria. "We had to sell things to pay." Sergio now gets his health care at Los Angeles' Venice Family Clinic. It's the nation's largest free clinic, and it cares for some 22,000 patients every year. Sergio's mom pays between $5 and $10 for every visit, but each visit costs the clinic up to $120. The difference is picked up by contributions and taxpayers.
Groups opposed to healthcare -- or any services -- for illegal immigrants say taxpayers shouldn't be picking up tab at all.

Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, says providing health care only encourages more illegal immigration. He also admits that denying access to health care to children is a tough call to make.

"This is a difficult, moral, ethical issue," says Stein. "But people have to realize that those who are being unfair are the parents who break our laws."

Nationwide, health care for the uninsured and undocumented costs taxpayers in the billions of dollars every year. Still, those costs represent a small slice of the overall cost of paying for the uninsured.

A 2004 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated it costs federal, state and local governments $34.6 billion to pay for medical treatment for those without insurance.

In California's Napa Valley, where pampered grapes produce world-famous wines and where the vineyards demand year-round attention from skilled laborers, vintners have come up with a unique way to provide health care for field workers, service employees and others who can't afford health insurance.

Clinic Ole sees about 15,000 patients every year, about 65 percent of whom are Hispanic. Neither Clinic Ole nor the Venice Family Clinic ask about legal status.

"I assume that about 15 percent of our patient load is possibly undocumented," says Beatrice Bostick, executive director of Clinic Ole.

As clinics go, it's about as nice as they get. The building is new, well designed and maintained. It looks like an upscale suburban medical facility. The waiting room is perpetually packed. Kids even have a place to play as they wait for their turn to see the doctor.

Two years ago, the clinic even started offering dental services. The dental clinic is state of the art. Patients can even watch TV or movies on flat-screen monitors as their teeth are scraped and cleaned.

Bostick says overall costs for kids' health care would be higher if not for places like Clinic Ole. The average cost for a child's visit is $153 dollars. But if that same child went to an emergency room, the cost could be as much as $560.

The point, says Bostick, is that preventative care is much cheaper in the long run than is dealing with a medical issue once it becomes emergent.

Still, FAIR's Stein says, where services for illegal immigrants are concerned, any price is too high.

"If you spin out the logical conclusion of where this is going," he says, "the United States is becoming a massive welfare state."

Maria de la Paz disagrees. She says she may be here illegally, but she has worked hard and paid taxes since she got here in the mid 1990s. Like many parents, she wants what's good for her son.

Sergio's asthma is now under control, and his mother says regular doctor visits made all the difference.

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/TheAgenda/story?id=3264260

"The uninsured rate for Latino children is almost three times that for white children," the report noted. "African American children are almost twice as likely, and Asian children more than one and a half times as likely to lack coverage."

http://news.asianweek.com/news/view_art ... 4a09c11e0e

No health insurance? You're probably illegal
Census: Skyrocketing numbers without medical coverage reflect migration

WASHINGTON – While "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore is blaming greed and a broken health care system for the inability of Americans to get health-care insurance, it turns out a heavy percentage of those without coverage are illegal aliens.

According to the latest Census Bureau figures, 43.6 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. are without health insurance. In addition, 33.6 percent of those born elsewhere are without coverage.


The statistics will be no surprise to health-care providers. Hospital emergency rooms in Florida and California have been forced to close their doors as a result of increased demands by uninsured and under-insured patients – many of them illegal aliens.

According to a study by University of South Florida researchers, much of the demand on hospitals comes from new residents of the state. More than half of all emergency room patients in some Florida hospitals do not have insurance.

Doctors who treat uninsured patients are not compensated for their treatment.

As a result, hospitals in Florida have lost surgeons and stand to lose entire surgical departments. Some hospitals are having a hard time getting physicians to work because they are choosing to work in other areas where they will be fully compensated for the treatment they give.

As WorldNetDaily previously reported, a study by a prominent medical attorney concludes the porous border with Mexico and the resulting influx of illegal aliens poses a major public health threat to the U.S.

Madeleine Pelner Cosman, author of a report in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons, is particularly concerned with [u]increases in multiple drug-resistant tuberculosis, chagas disease, dengue fever, polio, hepatitis A, B, and , she told Lou Dobbs on CNN in June.

"Certain diseases that we thought we had vanquished years ago are coming back, and other diseases that we've never seen or rarely seen in America, because they've always been the diseases of poverty and the Third World, are coming in now," she said. As WorldNetDaily reported, even leprosy is suddenly on the radar of health officials.

Cosman recommends closing the border to all illegal traffic, rescinding the citizenship of "anchor babies," those born in the U.S. to parents who are illegals, and making the aiding and abetting of illegals a crime.


Cosman said 84 hospitals in California have been forced to close because of the high cost of treating illegal aliens with only 50 percent of all treatments reimbursed by government.

"Even physicians in those emergency rooms don't fully get the point that by being compassionate, and generous, and gracious, they are, in essence, destroying their own livelihoods as well as their own hospitals," she said.

While politicians often mention there are 43 million without health insurance in this country, Cosman's 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.

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' 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.

"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

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/artic ... E_ID=56725

Senate Panel OKs Child Health Bill

Brushing aside threats of a presidential veto, a Senate committee on Thursday overwhelmingly approved a five-year, $35 billion expansion of a children's health insurance program that would be financed through higher tobacco taxes.

A majority of Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee joined all of the committee's Democrats in voting to reauthorize the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which subsidizes insurance for children and some adults with incomes too high for Medicaid but not high enough to afford private insurance. The vote was 17-4.

"There are more kids without health insurance than there are kids in the first and second grades," said Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., the committee chairman. "Americans overwhelmingly support getting kids covered."

The additional spending approved by the committee would bring total SCHIP funding to $60 billion over five years double what the administration has proposed. The tax on a pack of cigarettes would increase by 61 cents to help pay for the expansion. Taxes on cigars and chewing tobacco also would jump.

The committee's Democratic leaders had wanted to add $50 billion to the program, and their counterparts in the House are determined to pursue that amount. The compromise forged by the committee could become extremely fragile if GOP senators are forced to vote on an expansion much beyond what the committee approved.

"I hope they understand it takes 60 votes to get anything done in the United States Senate," said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa.

The 60 votes would be needed to overcome a filibuster. Baucus said he believes his proposal has enough support to overcome such a hurdle, as well as a promised veto from the president.

"The vote speaks for itself," Baucus said.

Lawmakers said the $35 billion expansion would allow 6.6 million people to maintain their current health coverage, plus it would provide coverage for an additional 3.2 million uninsured children.

Some dissenters on the committee believe the legislation raises taxes unnecessarily and does not do enough to refocus the program on low-income children.

"The Democrats are playing a game of reverse Robin Hood with this legislation," said Sen. Trent Lott, R-Miss.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/WireStor ... 216&page=1