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The International Herald Tribune covers the practice of U.S. hospitals which send illegal immigrants back to their native countries.
In a nutshell, most of these cases involve traumatic injuries received by illegal immigrants. They have no health insurance, they are here illegally, and the hospitals are bleed dry if they indefinitely keep treating these illegal aliens.
In some cases, as noted by the IHT, hospitals arrange flights to send these patients back to their native lands. The U.S. government isn't involved.
These people are here illegally. Had they attained citizenship, their illness would have been covered by Medicare, but instead, they are paying the price for their illegal act of entering the United States.
I do not find this practice heartless. These U.S. hospitals can't provide infinite care to illegal immigrants.
Simply put, these trauma cases overburden the system and the cost is passed on to people like you and me who actually pay their bills. Have you been in the hospital lately? Even a day or two can set you back thousands and thousands of dollars. Illegal immigration doesn't help the situation at all.
Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.
"What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we're unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens," said Alan Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona. "A full bed is a full bed."
Medical repatriations are happening with a frequency and a degree of patient consent that vary from state to state and hospital to hospital. No government agency or advocacy group keeps track of these cases, and it is difficult to quantify them.
Many hospitals engage in repatriations of seriously injured and ill immigrants only as a last resort. "We've done flights to Lithuania, Poland, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico," said Cara Pacione, director of social work at Mount Sinai Hospital in Chicago. "But out of about a dozen cases a year, we probably fly only a couple back." Read more….
**This was a production of The Coalition Against Illegal Immigration (CAII). If you would like to participate, please go to the above link to learn more. Afterwards, email brianbonner90-at-gmail-dot-com and let us know at what level you would like to participate.
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