Thread: Parkland Hospital Dallas

Parkland Hospital in Dallas. I received this in my e mail, sorry if it is a duplicate.

Check this out. The author is also a military wife. Parkland Memorial
Hospital - This is Unbelievable And this is just ONE hospital !!!

Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas is a fairly famous institution
and for a variety of reasons:

1. John F. Kennedy died there in 1963

2. Lee Harvey Oswald died there shortly after

3. Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died there a few years later
by coincidence.

On the flip side, Parkland is also home to the second busiest maternity
ward in the country with almost 16,000 new babies arriving each year.
(That's almost 44 per day---every day)

A recent patient survey indicated that 70 percent of the women who gave
birth at Parkland in the first three months of 2006 were illegal immigrants.
That is over 11, 000 babies!

According to the article, the hospital spent $70.7 million deliveries
15,938 babies in 2004 but managed to end up with almost $8 million dollars
in surplus funding. Medicaid kicked in $34.5 million. Dallas County
taxpayers kicked in $31.3 million and the feds tossed in another $9.5
million.

The average patient in Parkland 's maternity wards is 25 years old,
married and giving birth to her second child. She is also an illegal
immigrant. By law, pregnant women cannot be denied medical care based on
their immigration status or ability to pay. OK, fine. That doesn't mean
they should receive better care than everyday, middle-class American
citizens. But at Parkland Hospital, they do.

Parkland Memorial Hospital has nine prenatal clinics. NINE. The Dallas
Morning News article followed a Hispanic woman who was a patient at one of
the clinics and pregnant with her third child---her previous two were also
born at Parkland. Her first two deliveries were free and the Mexican
native was grateful because it would have cost $200 to have them in Mexico.
This time, the hospital wants her to pay $10 per visit and $100 for the
delivery but she was unsure if she could come up with the money. Not that
it matters because the hospital won't turn her away. (I wonder why they
even bother asking at this point.)

How long has this been going on? What are the long-term effects?
Well, another subject of the article was born at Parkland in 1986 shortly
after her mother entered the U.S. Illegally---now she is having her own
child
there as well. (That's right, she's technically a U.S. Citizen.) These
women receive free prenatal care including medication; nutrition, birthing
classes and child care classes. They also get freebies such as car seats,
bottles, diapers and formula.

Most of these things are available to American citizens as well but only
for low-income applicants and even then, the red tape involved is almost
insurmountable.

Because these women are illegal immigrants they do not have to provide any
sort of legitimate identification---no proof of income. An American citizen
would have to provide a social security number, which would reveal their
annual income---an illegal immigrant need only claim to be poor and the
hospital must take them at their word.

My husband is a pilot for the United States Navy (yes, he fought in Iraq )
and while the health care is good, we Navy wives don't get any of these
perks! Car seats? Diapers? Not so much. So my question is this: Does our
public medical care system treat illegal immigrants better than American
citizens? Yes it does!

As I mentioned, the care I have received is perfectly adequate but it's
bare bones, meat and potato medical care---not top of line.

Their (the illegals) medical care is free---simply because they are
illegal immigrants? Once again, there is no way to verify their income.
Parkland Hospital offers indigent care to Dallas County residents who earn
less than $40,000 per year. (They also have to prove that they did not
refuse health coverage at their current job. Yeah, the 'free' care is not
so easy for Americans.)

There are about 140 patients who received roughly $4 million dollars for
un-reimbursed medical care. As it turns out, they did not qualify for free
treatment because they resided outside of Dallas County . So the hospital is
going to sue them! Illegals get it all free! But U.S. Citizens who live
outside of Dallas County get sued! How stupid is this?

As if that isn't annoying enough, the illegal immigrant patients are
actually complaining about hospital staff not speaking Spanish. In this AP
story, the author speaks with a woman who is upset that she had to translate
comments from the hospital staff into Spanish for her husband. The doctor
was trying to explain the situation to the family and the mother was forced
to translate for her husband who only spoke Spanish. This was apparently a
great injustice to her. In an attempt to create a Spanish-speaking staff,
Parkland Hospital is now providing incentives in the form of extra pay for
applicants who speak Spanish. Additionally, medical students at the
University of Texas Southwestern for which Parkland Hospital is the training
facility will now have a Spanish language requirement added to their already
jammed-packed curriculum. No other school in the country boasts such a
ridiculous multi-semester (multicultural) requirement.

Dup;icate Article
http://www.alipac.us/ftopict-88651-parkland.html