Hospitals: Aid to offset costs of immigrants is necessary

[l1m89]

Hospitals: Aid to offset costs
of immigrants is necessary
September 24, 2006
Jennifer C. Smith
Monitor Staff Writer

McAllen Monitor, Texas — Between 20 and 25 undocumented immigrants arrive each week for kidney dialysis at Mission Regional Medical Center’s emergency room.

“They have no way of paying for it, and in six months they rack up $750,000,” said Mitch Ladyman, the hospital’s trauma coordinator. “That’s just a number we’ll never get reimbursed.”

And while the federal government has a $1 billion federal program intended to help with unpaid hospital emergency care, a recent Associated Press report shows a large chunk of that money has gone uncollected by cash-strapped hospitals.

Federal officials can’t explain why overburdened communities have not grabbed the cash.
Source (http://www.themonitor.com/PrintIt.cfm?Template =/GlobalTemplates/Details.cfm&StoryID=15506&Section=Local)

Illegals get free kidney dialysis and
Americas’ hospitals suffer.

:shake:

[RealDeal]

I posted this link in another thread but here it is from CA:

(emergency rooms are closing all over due to illegals)
Proposition 86
Tax on Cigarettes. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute.
(http://www.lao.ca.gov/ballot/2006/86_11_2006.htm)

Hospital Funding. Nearly three-fourths of the funds in this account would be allocated to hospitals to pay their unreimbursed costs for emergency services and to improve or expand emergency services, facilities, or equipment. Allocations would be based largely on the number of persons that hospitals treat in their emergency departments and their costs for providing health care for patients who are poor. Private hospitals and certain public hospitals, including those licensed to the University of California (UC), would be eligible to receive funding. Hospitals licensed to other state agencies or the federal government would not be eligible for funding.

and
Hospital Charges and Bill Collections. Hospitals that are allocated funds under this measure for emergency and trauma care services would be subject to limits on what they could charge to certain patients in families with incomes at or below 350 percent of the FPL [Federal Poverty Level]. These hospitals would also have to adopt written policies on their bill collection practices and, under certain circumstances, could not send unpaid bills to collection agencies, garnish wages, or place liens on the homes of patients as a means of collecting unpaid hospital bills.



They get the votes, we get the bill and fewer services for American citizens.

[Sovreign]

Illegal Aliens and American Medicine.
By Madeilene Pelner Cosman, Ph.D

This is a pdf file. You need acrobat reader to open it.

http://www.jpands.org/vol10no1/cosman.pdf

Free Acrobat Reader.
http://free-program-download.com/index1.htm