Thread: Bankrupting Hospitals

In the USA, all the illegal immigrants (and their many children who live in poverty) are bankrupting hospitals. Hospitals must accept any person who requires emergency treatment, whether they have the ability to pay or not. Hospitals which are not willing to treat the poor for free are not elligible to bill the government Medicare program for any services. Hospitals have to pass on the increased costs from the emergency departments (which almost always are costly and unprofitable) to people who do have the ability to pay. This is one of the main reasons that medical costs are so high. The overburdened hospitals often do not have the resources to properly take care of all the people who cannot pay. When something goes wrong, the hospitals get sued for millions of dollars, or even are forced to shut down by government health regulators for not providing adequate care.

In the densely populated cities with many poor immigrants, there are long lines to get into the emergency rooms at the hospitals, the waiting rooms are crowded, and it is not uncommon for people to have to wait in lines which stetch outside the hospital. The waiting time is often hours. There have been countless instances of people dying while waiting for treatment. In Los Angeles, California, ambulances are often turned away from overburdened hospitals, often having to drive their patients to other hospitals, which can be up to 2 hours away. In Los Angeles, there are only two hospitals which are not facing impending bankruptcy!

When a hospital is forced to close down, it does not solve the problem. All the non-paying patients it formerly had to take care of have to drive farther to hospitals in more affluent areas. This can result in cascading failure, where the increased burden from one hospital shutting down creates an unsustainable burden on other nearby hospitals, which ultimately results in a chain of hospital closures. In lower income areas, there are often not any nearby hospitals left which accept Medicare.

You might ask why hospitals just stop accepting Medicare so they do not have to treat the poor for free.
In the USA, workers are taxed to pay for the Medicare system. The idea is that they pay taxes while they are in their younger working years to help pay for their own medical expenses when they get older. If you want to get less expensive treatment at a hospital which does not have to treat the poor, you will not be getting any of your Medicare tax money back! You will have to pay the full ammount of the bill, and Medicare will not reimburse you or the hospital for any portion, despite the fact that you were taxed all of your working life.

How much are the Taxes?
Employers must withold 1.45% of the salaries of their workers, with the employer also paying an additional matching 1.45% of salaries paid. A self-employed individual must pay the entire 2.9% tax on self employed net earnings. Because of of the increasing burden on hospitals, the tax rate will soon be increased to 3.8% for higher incomes.

Under the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985, hospitals are obligated to treat the uninsured without reimbursement.
Government imposes viciously stiff fines and penalties on any physician and any hospital refusing to treat any patient that a zealous prosecutor deems an emergency patient, even though the hospital or physician screened and declared the patient's illness or injury non-emergency. But government pays neither hospital nor physician for treatments. In addition to the fiscal attack on medical facilities and personnel, EMTALA is a handy truncheon with which to pummel politically unpopular physicians by falsely accusing them of violating EMTALA."

In 2010, the direct cost to taxpayers to provide free emergency health care for more than 52,000 illegal aliens in the state of Massachusetts alone was $35.7 million. Note that this is only the direct cost; the hospitals subsidize their emergency departments through charity or higher costs to other patients.

In the state of California, the law requires all hospitals to accept non-paying emergency patients, whether the hospital accepts Medicare or not! 84 California hospitals are closing their doors as a direct result of the rising number of illegal aliens and their non-reimbursed tax on the system. Between 1993 and 2003, 60 California hospitals closed because half their services became unpaid. Another 24 California hospitals are on the verge of closure.

The Texas Hospital Association has estimated that the annual cost to hospitals of providing medical treatment to illegal immigrants, who are either unable or unwilling to pay, was nearly $400 million a year, of which the hospitals only get compensated about $100 million through the emergency Medicaid program paid for by the state.

The "Children with Special Health Care Needs" program is a supplemental health care program designed to help indigent children with extraordinary or chronic health care problems that are too expensive to treat in traditional Medicaid. Although the program does not distinguish between legal residents and illegal residents, most of the children enroled in the program are not citizens. In December of 2005, there were 1,452 non-citizens in the program, which constituted 68.8 % of all clients enrolled. 78.9% of the medical payments are spent on these non-citizens.

The USA is only beginning to see the medical costs from illegal immigrants, most of whom came as younger adults. As these people age, they will place an increasing burden on hospitals and the government, which pays for elderly care facillities. Note that the legal-born children of illegal immigrants, who do not show up in the statistics, will be far more expensive to take care of than their parents.

http://www.wnd.com/2005/03/29329/