Healthcare Costs and Illegal Immigrants

I read an interesting article over the weekend in my local paper titled Hospitals feel drag of illegal immigrants. This site does require registration to view this article so I'll try to quote portions that I am commenting on:

"In Tarrant County, which consists mainly of Fort Worth [Texas], hospitals require foreign-born indigent patients to furnish proof of legal residence. However, at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas County, management has a de-facto don't-ask, don't-tell policy. Last year the facility spent $76 million caring for non-county residents or people believed to be illegal immigrants, hospital officials say."

"From Brownsville to El Paso, the rapidly growing number of "anchor babies" is costing hospitals millions of dollars, health officials say. "Anchor babies" are the newborns of undocumented immigrants, who use such children to become legal since anyone born in this country is automatically a citizen regardless of the parents' nationality."

"In Dallas County 70 percent of women who gave birth in the first three months of 2006 were here illegally. In Oklahoma 83 percent of the money spent on illegal immigrants is in maternity wards. In Georgia $100-$300 million is spent each year in non-emergency care for illegal immigrants."

Healthcare and health insurance costs are a growing concern in the US. One of the causes of that is "cost shifting". Hospitals and other care providers shift costs not paid by illegals, uninsured and amounts over Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates to those who do pay and/or have insurance. The concern of growing illegal immigrant healthcare costs should be a concern of all of us not to mention the problem of "anchor babies" causing greater illegal immigrant problems.

Many hospitals are starting to require proof of citizenship for service but many do not and will probably continue to provide care for illegals until the money they are losing from such care becomes impossible to ignore. Of course, there will be some upset that we turn away illegal immigrants for healthcare but there comes a point where we cannot continue to absorb those costs as citizens.

This provides yet another reason we need to do something about illegal immigration.