Are illegals really the cause of expensive health care?

Some of Mr. Maven’s “I’ve got mine” retired ailine pilot friends would have you think so. Unfortunately, the issues surrounding just which parts of our health care system can be accessed by resident aliens - legal or otherwise - pose a complicated picture.

This is what I got in the email today:

Context is everything for an issue like this.

According to Wikipedia, Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (2003) (EMTALA):

Illegal immigrants

According to the Census Bureau, some 9.7 million of the nation’s 45.7 million uninsured people in 2007 were non-citizens.^[13] Access by illegal immigrants to U.S. health care through EMTALA remains a source of controversy. The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 contains a provision for $250 million per year for fiscal years 2005-2008 in payments to eligible providers for emergency health services provided to undocumented aliens and other specified aliens.

According to a 2007 analysis by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured, uninsured adult low-income non-citizens were the least likely to use emergency rooms, with only about one in ten reporting a visit in the past year.^[14] Adult non-citizens most often rely on clinics and health centers, many of which are funded by charities as well as hospitals seeking to unburden their emergency rooms.^[14]

However, immigration restrictionist groups like the Center for Immigration Studies and Federation for American Immigration Reform have argued that illegal immigrants still disproportionately burden the emergency rooms as they are uninsured to a far higher extent, and are therefore to a much higher extent unable to pay for their emergency room visits. Also, they claim that because the children of illegal immigrants are often U.S. citizens, the cost of treating them is ignored.^[15] Nevertheless, since non-citizens make up 21.2% of the uninsured, and they are the least likely of the uninsured to use emergencies rooms, their cost is at most $8.6 billion per year.

So, if you parse the numbers here, although on a hospital by hospital basis, this might indeed be an expensive and unfortunate dilemma that needs to be dealt with, it still only amounts to a very small percentage of total health care expensing.

Additionally, many of those opposing health care reform are also selling the idea that it will be a gravy train for illegals. Again, not so fast, and not so simple.

According to FactCheck.org of the Annenberg Public Policy Center (and remember, Walter Annenberg was one of Ronald Reagans’ closest friends and hardly a screaming liberal), this is completely false.

There is specific language in the current bills that would keep them from being abused by illegals.

The Congressional Research Service ( ‘Treatment of Illegals under HR 3200) studied the issue of illegals and health care reform, concluding that any illegals who would use the system would be a very small number, and of those an even smaller number might be able to game the system.

In fact, when you look at how the system would require mandates for coverage - if the Republicans don’t screw that up - it would require all to have coverage. Illegals and legal residents.

If illegals were caught without, they could - conceivably - be fined and deported by the INS. If INS chooses not to do that, then that is a different problem, requiring different solutions. Legal residents should not be denied health care reform for other issues unrelated to health care delivery.

If illegals buy coverage - as many do already - then what’s the problem? Taxpayers aren’t paying for that now, and wouldn’t be in the future (assuming the Republicans will get out of the way of a health insurance exchange).

A ‘public option’ would actually go a long way toward preventing illegals from gaming the system, by providing them an affordable, legal, option.

Too bad that the anti-immigration activists are also the same ones who oppose a ‘public option’, since it seems that the public option would cure one of their biggest pain points.

Ain’t that odd?

BTW: the retired pilot who sent the video clip, learned to fly on the government dime - in the military - and never put in a day in a war zone (a long, stateside, career in the Guard) before going on the lucrative (back in the day) airline career.