Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
-- Inscription on the Statue of Liberty's pedestal.
"I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone."
-- The Hippocractic Oath, taken by doctors to swear by ethical medical practice.
"Can't afford medical attention? We'd rather pay for an ambulance to dump your sick ass back over the border."
-- U.S. hospitals.
Our health care system is deeply flawed, yes, but this is downright sinister. Hospitals - not enforcement agencies - are forcibly dumping immigrants back to their homelands. It would be bad enough if hospitals ratted out these immigrants to the authorities, but they're taking it upon themselves to privately deport them so they can save money. This is repulsive.
From the NY Times article exposing this "apparently widespread" practice:
Mr. Jiménez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. 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.
American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.
Indeed, some advocates for immigrants see these repatriations as a kind of international patient dumping, with ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.
1 comment:
Unfortunately, people who pay into Medicare and Social Security for their entire working lives get shipped out of nursing homes, back into their own homes if they don't have the bucks to pay for their care. Unless, they learn how to game the system, or pay down all their savings to qualify for Medicaid.
I don't know what kind of alternative there is to sending them back, and it puts hospitals in a bad place. Doctors do pledge to "do no harm", but who is going to pay the bill?
RV
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