Sunday, December 02, 2007

Undocumented persons are NOT a health care burden on the US

The University of Texas-Medical Branch is considering, in the words of the local xenophobes, "kicking illegals off the welfare rolls":

(UTMB) might stop offering cancer care to indigent, undocumented immigrants, a policy that would save money but run counter to the medical school's mission of treating the poor.

If the medical branch turns away undocumented immigrants, the Harris County Hospital District likely will see an increase in its patient load, said King Hillier, vice president of public policy and government relations of the district that operates Ben Taub General, Houston's largest public hospital.


Making health care a business decision -- the monetizing of American health -- is where we went off the rails many years ago. In SiCKO it was revealed, in a conversation between John Erlichman and Richard Nixon, that Edgar Kaiser (he of the nation's first HMO) had an idea both men were fond of : rationing healthcare for profit. Recall also that Michael Moore took a group of sick Ground Zero New Yorkers to Cuba, where they received treatment denied them in the United States.

But back to the point here, there simply needs to be more pushback on the lies constantly advanced by the Nativists:

Illegal Latino immigrants do not cause a drag on the U.S. health care system as some critics have contended and in fact get less care than Latinos in the country legally, researchers said on Monday.

Such immigrants tend not to have a regular doctor or other health-care provider yet do not visit emergency rooms -- often a last resort in such cases -- with any more frequency than Latinos born in the United States, according to the report from the University of California's School of Public Health.


Let's wait for the "California liberals/bias" shouting to stop.

Now then ...

About 8.4 million of the 10.3 million illegal aliens in the United States are Latino, of which 5.9 million are from Mexico, the report said.

Recall my previous posting regarding these numbers. With this kind of disparity who knows what the correct numbers/ratios actually are at this point? Continuing ...

"Low rates of use of health-care services by Mexican immigrants and similar trends among other Latinos do not support public concern about immigrants' overuse of the health care system," the researchers wrote.

"Undocumented individuals demonstrate less use of health care than U.S.-born citizens and have more negative experiences with the health care that they have received," they said.


Italic emphasis mine. What do you suppose that means? That the doctors understood their patients' situations and gave them less than the best care?

There is no way that "socialized medicine" could be any worse (based on the demonstrated delivery of health care in other countries, including Mexico).

No. way.

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