Thread: FREE MEDI-CAL FOR ILLEGALS : LOS ANGELES TIMES

Illegal alien health care is better than what I have. If I pretend my name is Gomez can I get free health care as well?

Don't walk in without a deep sun tan

Posted on Wed, Jan. 03, 2007

Immigrants' birth rights
By EVELYN LARRUBIA
Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES - Sandra Andrade lay in her hospital bed, overcome with anxiety about her newborn son.

All through her pregnancy, she had worried. The placenta was blocking her birth canal and growing into other organs. She knew she needed a Cesarean: If she went into labor, she might bleed to death.

Now her boy was in intensive care at Women's and Children's Hospital at Los Angeles County USC Medical Center. With his future -- and her own recovery -- on her mind, Andrade, 36, was relieved to be spared at least one worry: Who would pay for their care.

She'd been without private insurance since the premiums became too costly. But a friend assured her that, even as an undocumented immigrant from Colombia, she would qualify for Medi-Cal, the state and federal health insurance program for the poor.

Andrade, a clothing exporter, is one of more than 100,000 undocumented women each year who bear children in California with expenses paid by Medi-Cal, according to state reports. They now account for about 1 in 5 births.

Regardless of their parents' status, the children are U.S. citizens by law.

Generous benefits|

Many undocumented immigrants who might otherwise shy away from government services view care associated with childbirth as something they can safely seek, a protected right.

''I wasn't afraid at all,'' said Andrade, who came to the United States with her daughters on a tourist visa and stayed here with her boyfriend after it expired. ''I'd always heard that pregnant women are treated well here.''

California long has been one of the more generous states in offering such benefits, covering everything from pregnancy tests to postpartum checkups for impoverished undocumented immigrants.

Such births and associated expenses account for more than $400 million of the nearly $1 billion that the program spends each year on health care for illegal immigrants in California, documents and reports show. Only about a dozen other states extend similar benefits to illegal immigrants, according to health and immigrants'-rights groups.

Although it has not so far figured prominently in the national discussion of immigration reform, a debate is simmering about the costs -- and the rights -- of illegal immigrants' U.S.-born children.

Some advocates for immigration control want to abolish automatic or ''birthright'' citizenship for babies born to undocumented women in the United States. They consider it just the first in an unacceptably long line of public benefits flowing to children who were born here only because their mothers broke the law.

''I think most Americans think that -- while they certainly don't want to do anything to harm children -- you cannot have a policy that says anybody in the world come here and have a baby and we have a new American,'' said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, an immigration control group based in Washington, D.C.

One of the most controversial aspects of coverage has been prenatal care. Labor and delivery long have been considered emergencies, entitled to some federal reimbursement. But federal officials have balked at covering prenatal care since at least the 1980s. (Generally, the state and federal governments share the cost of Medicaid programs -- called Medi-Cal in California.)

In 1989, California passed a law guaranteeing prenatal care to all impoverished women, with the state footing the bill. Last year, it began to tap federal funds dedicated to health care for working families , under the theory that the fetus will ultimately be an American child. Some other states have done the same.

Prenatal care pays off|

Those who favor such coverage say it's cheaper to pay for prenatal care than risk complications that could saddle the U.S. government with staggering medical bills.

An often-cited 1985 study by the Institute of Medicine found that every dollar spent on prenatal care saves more than $3 in medical costs by reducing the number of underweight babies and other problems.

''Without prenatal care, there's a serious risk that a child will be born with severe disabilities,'' said Lucy Quacinella, a lobbyist for the Los Angeles social service agency Maternal and Child Health Access. ''The cost of caring for that child over a lifetime is astronomical when you compare the cost of having provided the prenatal care for the mother.''

State figures indicate that regular births and prenatal and postnatal care cost an average of $3,224 and Caesarean deliveries $5,153. But complications can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Andrade's son, for instance, spent 10 days in an incubator. County officials said it costs about $3,000 a day to care for an infant in a neonatal intensive care unit.

Whatever the costs, some immigrants and their advocates insist that they can't be considered in a vacuum. Undocumented immigrants contribute to the economy in the form of cheap labor, as well as sales and payroll taxes, including payments to Social Security, which many will never collect.

''My husband pays taxes. They take a bunch out of his paycheck,'' Ludys Ortiz, 36, said as she nursed her newborn son, Christian, at Women's and Children's Hospital, down the hall from Andrade. Her husband works for $12 an hour washing cars at a body shop.

Ortiz, who entered the United States illegally in 2004 from Honduras, worked as a caretaker for children and the elderly, then as a house cleaner. The pregnancy was unexpected.

''I am embarrassed because I'm not from here, I didn't pay anything and they delivered my baby without my having to pay anything,'' she said. ''But I'm more grateful than ashamed, because there's no sin in asking for help, only in stealing.

''We all have some rights in life. No matter what, we're human beings,'' she said. ''The only thing that divides us is a few pieces of paper.''

Ortiz, who was caught by immigration authorities in Texas shortly after her arrival, is not planning to stay in the United States. She said she desperately misses her daughter in Central America, and will tell the judge she wants to go home, taking her son with her. Her family's mission in the United States was accomplished: earning enough money to build a tile-roofed house in the Choluteca province of Honduras.

Undocumented women who rely on Medi-Cal during pregnancy often express gratitude. Some say they feel a bit guilty, but shame seldom enters the conversation, even when the recipients are from a middle-class background.

''What I think is that we're all immigrants in this country.... Those who were born here are merely children of immigrants, which doesn't give them the right to say that the rest of us don't have the rights,'' said Sandra Escobar, a Salvadoran who came to the United States illegally with her accountant husband to escape the collapsing economy and who unexpectedly became pregnant.

''My son will always be the child of an immigrant,'' she said, gazing at the moon-faced newborn she was nursing at Women's and Children's Hospital.