Thread: Tallying Health Costs of Illegals

Tallying health costs of illegals
Study finds immigrants are not a disproportionate burden
Victoria Colliver, Chronicle Staff Writer

Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Adult illegal immigrants tend to be younger and healthier than their legal-resident counterparts, resulting in relatively low use of health care services, according to a study released Tuesday.

Undocumented adults account for about $6.4 billion a year in national health care expenses, $1.1 billion of which is paid from public funds, according to the study by the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica think tank. That compares with a total of $88 billion in government funds spent on health care for adults other than seniors during 2000.

The calculation of the cost of financing illegal immigrant health care was made by extrapolating data collected in 2000 and 2001 for a study of about 2,400 immigrants in Los Angeles County.

"The public cost of immigration is not in health care," said James Smith, a senior economist at Rand and one of the study's authors. "Why are we spending such an inordinate amount of time debating where the dollars are not? Nine-five percent of the dollars are in schools, not the health care system."

Estimating the amount of health care money spent on undocumented immigrants is difficult because federal law prohibits hospital staff from asking a patient's immigration status.

Rand researchers chose to rely on the 5-year-old Los Angeles study because it contained detailed information on participants' legal or visa status, along with their health status, how much health care they used and whether they had any insurance coverage.

Of the 664 illegal immigrants in the study, 68 percent were uninsured. Only 19 percent had a chronic medical condition, compared with 38 percent of U.S.-born adults, the study reported. About 58 percent of illegal immigrants reported visiting a doctor in the previous year, while 80 percent of adults born in the country had seen a physician.

About 11 percent of undocumented immigrants in the study had been hospitalized in the prior year, compared with 13 percent of the native-born population. Smith said undocumented women have relatively high rates of hospitalization due to childbirth.

Health care providers that focus on low-income and immigrant populations agreed with the study's findings.

"Immigrants in general tend to be young, working people and they tend to be healthy," said Ralph Silber, executive director of the Alameda Health Consortium, an association of eight nonprofit community health centers. "People who are incredibly sick tend not to be crossing borders, and certainly not crossing borders illegally."

Still, Silber said, he's concerned about undocumented adults who avoid routine health care because of the cost or fear that their status may be discovered.

Groups that favor limits on immigration called the study misleading.

"If you look at the hospitals, especially in those border states, many have closed down or are on verge of collapsing, due in large part to the health care they are required to provide by law to illegal immigrants," said Yeh Ling-Ling, executive director of Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America in Oakland.

Illegal immigration strains all public services, from health to education and transportation, Yeh said. "Immigration is not causing our problems, but mass immigration is making concerns involving legal residents impossible to solve," she said.

Illegal immigrants might contribute to crowded emergency rooms and hospitals' financial losses, but they are not the driving factor, said Jan Emerson, spokeswoman for the California Hospital Association.

"It is unfair for the public to place the blame for all of societal ills -- in this case, hospital ills -- on undocumented or illegal immigrants," she said, adding that the vast majority of the country's 46 million uninsured people are native-born or legal residents. "If we were to resolve the issue, we still have major problems with our health care system."

Online resource
A copy of the report, "Immigrants and the Cost of Medical Care," can be found at content.healthaffairs.org/current.shtml.

E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com.

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