Thread: Mexico's Health Care System Is a Wreck

Physician, Heal Thyself: Special Pleaders Demand Coverage of Illegal Aliens, While Mexico’s Health Care System Is a Wreck

By George W. Grayson
November 2009

Memorandums
Download a pdf of this Memorandum
http://www.cis.org/articles/2009/mexican_healthcare.pdf

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George W. Grayson is the Class of 1938 Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary, a board member of CIS, an associate scholar at FPRI, and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic & International Studies. His next book, Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State? will be published this fall by Transaction Publishers. (757) 221-3031; gwgray@wm.edu.
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The demand that illegal immigrants be eligible for taxpayer-funded benefits under the health care reform measures now before Congress offers an opportunity to examine the deep flaws in Mexico’s own health care system. American taxpayers already provide more than $1,100 in health care every year for each of the nearly eight million Mexican immigrants (legal and illegal) in the United States who are uninsured or on Medicaid. This is more than twice the per capita health expenditure of Mexico’s own health sector, which is corrupt, unwieldy, and grossly underfunded. Mexico’s neglect of its own people’s health care increases the demands of its expatriates on America’s emergency rooms, clinics, hospitals, doctors, and other providers.


The 24 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC) have voiced outrage that the pending health care reform will exclude illegal aliens. This prohibition may even spur the CHC and its allies in the House and Senate to shortchange their legal constituents by opposing HR 3200 or any related legislation that reaches the floor.

Even if the CHC hasn’t fathomed the public’s resentment to rewarding law-breakers, the message has reached the White House. President Barack Obama in his September speech to Congress on health care stopped talking about 47 million “peopleâ€

. . . will do almost anything to avoid a public hospital emergency room, where ailing patients may languish for hours slumped on cracked linoleum floors that smell of sweat, sickness, and pine-scented disinfectant.

Sounds very similar to the emergency room in my illegal over-run town in Illinois. Not too long ago an American citizen died in the waiting room because emergency room staff were busy treating victims of a gang fight.