Arizona mulling no health care for illegal immigrants

When Mini Militant was born, I was slightly disgruntled to discover that the illegal immigrants in the room next to us (lovely couple, by the way) were having their son's extensive hospital stay paid for by the hospital trust because they didn't have insurance.

The fact that they're required to do this by New Jersey state law explains why the birth of our baby boy wound up costing our insurer $40,000 or more.

'Paying customers' like us were basically picking up the shortfall for giving tens of thousands of dollars of 'free' care to the uninsured (and, if we didn't, the hospital would go out of business.)

In California, where there are many more illegal immigrants, the legal requirement to give treatment to the uninsured has actually resulted in a slew of hospitals and clinics shutting up shop. It's a very serious issue and one of the major reasons why health care costs are spiralling out of control all across the country.

Well, in Arizona they've said: "No more."

Republican lawmakers in Arizona have proposed a bill that would require hospitals to check the immigration status of each patient before they were checked in - and refuse them service if they were illegal.

Arizona SB 1405 "Before a hospital admits a person for nonemergency care, a hospital admissions officer must confirm that the person is a citizen of the United States, a legal resident of the United States or lawfully present in the United States."

The bill would require hospitals to refuse treatment to non-urgent patients, and force them to call federal immigration officers after giving urgent care to illegal aliens. These were important steps, the sponsors of the bill argued, to reining in what they defined as rampant abuse of Arizona's medical system.

"I get calls from doctors and nurses every day that work in the emergency rooms," argues State Senate President Russell Pearce, co-sponsor of the bill. "They're talking about the abuse. The millions of dollars spent for folks who come in for pregnancy tests, sniffles. They use emergency room services as their primary care physician. When do we stand up for the taxpayers? Those who pay for insurance? There's a cost to this. The cost of hundreds of millions of dollars."

"No, nobody is going to turn those folks down. The federal law still requires us to take emergencies and stabilize them. What we want to do is stop the inducement. Quit inviting people over the border. While we give them free stuff, they come here and get free medical. I have to pay for my insurance, they walk in, because they're illegal they get free care, they use the emergency room as the primary care physician. We're saying enough is enough."

Is 'enough' enough?

I admit, I share the frustration of Pearce and the sponsors of the bill - but ultimately I have a decidedly European outlook to health care and feel that providing medical care to all is one of the basic, fundamental requirements of a civilized country.

Yet with America spending more on health care than any other country on Earth - and medicare and other entitlements about to send the nation into virtual foreclosure - can we afford to give foreign nationals [illegal foreign nations, to clarify - not legal aliens - Editorial Bear] the medical care they should be getting at home?

What are you thoughts?

Redux: NHS vs. American Health Care

A reader pointed out that my post yesterday was very, very long - which is fine, apart from when you painstakingly dissect facts and figures and suffix it all with a statement like 'but that's all irrelevant to the matter at hand.' So, because Shakespeare said that 'brevity is the soul of wit' here is the same column with the fluff removed:

72% of NHS patients complain that the stethoscope is too cold

Comparing the British NHS to American Health Care
Now with 50% less superfluous exposition!

Comparing the NHS and the current health care system in the United States isn't really fair or helpful.

On the one hand, the American system can be criticized for being monstrously expensive and not covering enough of its citizens. Per capita, it costs twice as much to offer health care to the population of the United States - yet Fox News reports that 13.4% of Americans are still left without coverage.

The United Kingdom, on the other hand, has universal coverage, a lower rate of infant mortality and a longer average life expectancy. The cost of giving medical coverage to Britain's citizens is also several thousand dollars less per person than in America.

But while Britain's health care is cheaper and covers the whole population, many people argue that this is only possible thanks to the indirect benefits of America's privately funded system.

It's a fact that many of the worlds leading pharmaceutical companies are based in the United States - and most of the new and exciting drugs and treatments emerge from the American health care system. The US system absorbs the related costs of researching and developing these new treatments (perhaps explaining why their health care costs so much more.)

And without having to pay for 'inventing' them, British patients benefit from these new drugs and treatments - just not immediately. Most commonly prescribed medication is as much as a decade 'behind' the new and exciting drugs available in America.

But at least British patients don't have to pay for that development - and that cuts a huge chunk out of the related costs of running a universal health care system.

Perhaps that's not a fair analysis - but it does offer an explanation for the gross disparity between the costs of universal health care in Britain and America's privately funded system.

America's race to develop new treatments also explains why some areas of medicine - like the treatment of cancer - are notably 'better' in America than in the UK.

Some British people have to come to America to get the medical treatment that's simply not available to them at home. Meanwhile, drugs developed in America make a huge impact when they're eventually adopted by the NHS.

So it's fair to argue that the two systems are inextricably linked - and the discussion about changing the way America looks after the health of her 300 million citizens actually affects far more people than just those with a US passport.