Uncompensated care flood

In a "protect-our-way-of-life" letter to the editor that appeared in the Bryan-College Station Eagle on Tuesday of this week, the author stated, "[Illegal immigrants] flood our health care facilities, getting free health care - which has caused many hospitals and health centers in the Southwest to go bankrupt."

Not so.

There isn't any authoritative support for the oft-repeated accusation pushed by the anti-immigrant crowd that unauthorized immigration is bankrupting medical providers. Factors contributing to bankruptcies of for-profit hospitals and medical clinics include growth of managed care enrollment, mismanagement, debt levels, reductions of Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements, and uncompensated care costs incurred by providing medical care services to underinsured and uninsured folks.

A national disgrace, the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not offer its citizens guaranteed health care coverage. According to the Census Bureau, the number of adults in this country without health insurance in 2005 rose to nearly 47 million, 70% of whom are in families with one or more full-time workers. The Census Bureau also reported that over 8 million children in this country also do not have any health insurance coverage, and according to these findings nearly sixteen million adults were underinsured in 2003. (Looked at another way, there are more uninsured adults in America than the entire population of Canada -- or Spain, or Argentina, or South Africa.)

A significant percentage of unauthorized immigrants, however, do have health insurance, primarily through their employers. As reported last year by the Pew Hispanic Center (which does not engage in issue advocacy) in a background briefing prepared for the Independent Task Force on Immigration and America’s Future, 41 percent of unauthorized adults, 47 percent of unauthorized children, and 75 percent of native-born children of unauthorized parents do have health insurance. Using this data, the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy has calculated the number of uninsured unauthorized immigrants at approximately 7.2 million persons nationwide.

Do uninsured unauthorized immigrants contribute to uncompensated health care costs? Sure they do, but as evidenced in a report issued in September of this year that examined the extent to which unauthorized immigrants are a burden to the U.S. health care system, the Udall Center concluded: "It is difficult to make the case that unauthorized immigrants, as a group, drive uncompensated care costs." In large part this is because "the number of native-born uninsured is larger than the number of uninsured immigrants" and "immigrant (authorized and unauthorized) usage of health care services is significantly lower than that of native-born people."

In fact, a Rand Corporation study, released on the very same day as the "protect our way of life" letter to the Eagle, concluded that because of their lower rates of use and less reliance on public sources, the per household tax to provide public medical care to unauthorized immigrants is about $11.00--a far cry from the wildly exaggerated and unsupported allegations by the anti-immigrant crowd.

The writer is correct that our health care providers are being flooded by folks getting "free" medical care, but he is mistaken in attributing that flood to unauthorized immigrants. As the evidence shows, the real flood is a native-born flood. If every unauthorized immigrant were to be magically whisked away at this very moment, we'd still have a colossal problem in this country with uncompensated medical care costs. The answer to uncompensated medical care costs is not elimination of unauthorized immigrants. The answer is elimination of our national disgrace.