Care for Undocumented Immigrants

A news story this weekend about a growing trend in care for undocumented immigrants is raising a lot of eyebrows. Here's a snippet, from The New York Times:

Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

...

Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

This is, indeed a case of two broken systems colliding - the broken health care system and the broken immigration system. And the collision is only deepening the national crisis.

Comments

[Life Insurance Canada]

It's really a Gordic knot. We can't forget that there is the Hippocratic Oath. It's one of the pillars of medicine and its ethic and moral. On the other hand, hospitals can't survive such pressure for long. And the worst thing, there is no Alexander the Great to cut the problem. You have to loose one string after another...
Lorne