11-27-2007
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City Council Member
the roser
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Member Since: Oct 2007
Location: Chicagoland
Posts: 150
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Re: Hillarycare or Hillarycon ?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Captain Trips
Illegals threaten closure of emergency rooms
Hospital emergency rooms in Florida may soon be closing their doors as a result of increased demands by uninsured and under-insured patients – many of them illegal aliens.
.............more
WorldNetDaily: Illegals threaten closure of emergency rooms
L.A. Emergency Rooms Full of Illegal Immigrants
Overburdened by the uninsured and overwhelmed by illegal immigration (search), public health care in Los Angeles is on life support.
Sixty percent of the county's uninsured patients are not U.S. citizens. More than half are here illegally. About 2 million undocumented aliens in Los Angeles County alone are crowding emergency rooms because they can't afford to see a doctor.
........more
FOXNews.com - L.A. Emergency Rooms Full of Illegal Immigrants - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum
ILLEGAL ALIENS AND EMTALA
The influx of Illegal Aliens has devastating, hidden medical consequences. We judge reality primarily by what we see. But what we do not see can be more dangerous, more expensive, and more deadly than what is seen.
What is unseen is their free medical care that has degraded and closed some of America’s finest emergency medical facilities and caused hospital bankruptcies: 84 California hospital are closing their doors forever.[3] An important cause of these hospital closures is the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985 (EMTALA).
What is seen is the political statistic that 43 million lives are at risk in America because those people have no health insurance.[4] What is unseen is that medical insurance does not equal medical care. Uninsured people get medical care in hospital Emergency Rooms under the coercive EMTALA that obligates hospitals to treat the uninsured but does not pay for that care. Also unseen is the percentage of uninsured who are Illegal Aliens. No one knows how many Illegal Aliens reside in America. If 10 million, they constitute nearly 25% of the uninsured. If more, more.
EMTALA requires each Emergency Room to treat anyone who enters with an “emergency” associated with cough, headache, hangnail, cardiac arrest, herniated lumbar disc, drug addiction, alcohol overdose, gunshot injury, automobile trauma, HIV-positive infection, mental problem, or personality disorder. Definition of emergency is flexible and vague enough to include almost any condition as requiring mandatory care. Any patient coming to a hospital emergency room requesting emergency care must be screened and treated until stabilized for discharge or stabilized for transfer whether or not insured, whether or not “documented,” and whether or not able to pay.
High-tech hospital emergency units degenerated into local free medical offices. In California, for instance, between 1993 and 2003, 60 hospitals closed because of over 50% of unpaid services, and another 24 California hospitals closed in 2004. Even ambulances from Mexico come to Emergency Rooms with indigents because the drivers know that EMTALA requires accepting patients who come within 250 yards of a hospital. That geographic limit has figured in many lawsuits.
Madeleine Cosman -- Illegal Aliens and EMTALA
Those interested in "facts" can find even MORE.
* So tell me again how it's "ludicrous" that illegal immigrants are causing problems in our healthcare
system(s) by clogging up emergency rooms and having no ability to pay for services used. Or was I given incorrect information ? People working in all facets of healthcare (even emergency rooms) are volunteer workers who we don't have to pay ?
Remember your own, earlier advice: You can't have an honest debate unless you know the facts. *
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Putting aside the fact that you are sourcing "World Net Daily" a known right wing propoganda site. You link to two articles by Madeleine Pelner Cosman, the source of the thoughroly debunked notion that leporsy is making a comeback. If you pay close attention to her numbers, she mixes uninsured with illegal statistics together in an apparent attempt to inflate the effect of illegal aliens. LA and Miami hospitals, and many other big city hospitals, are having problems because of a concentration of poor people. Some are illegals, some aren't. Her answer seems to be let them die. Is that your answer? In a single payor system, treating the poor would not bankrupt hospitals.
Maybe I'm not clear on what you are saying Trips. Are you saying the way to deal with people who can't afford health care is let them die in the streets?
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