Taking our jobs, robbing our stores, staring at our womenfolk, speaking them funny langwidges, and using lots of health care. It’s no wonder the dam’ US of A is hurting, with all them furriners here.
Can’t speak to the jobs, robs, or staring, but I do know the complaints about illegal immigrants using lots of care and driving up our costs are wildly overstated.
Sure, there’s lots of stuff circulating out there about how they all come here to have babies then need lots of care, which hospitals have to provide, which then causes them to go out of business. But most of it is anecdotal, makes wild leaps of logic, conflates illegal immigrants with regular Americans without insurance, and/or is flat out wrong.
Here’s the real scoop.
A study by the RAND Corporation found that health care costs for illegal immigrants amounted to a total of 1.25% of government funds spent on health care for non-seniors (2000 data).
Total health care costs for undocumented adults accounted for $6.4 billion that year, a pittance compared to total US health care expenditures.
In fact, 58% of immigrants have private health insurance and another 17.3% are covered by Medicare or Medicaid. Yet their health care costs are lower than for native-born Americans. Spending for immigrants averages less than half of us ‘real’ Americans’ costs. And 30% of immigrants used no health care at all during the preceding year.
If you’d like to discuss or disagree, include citations.
The Rand study is inadequate to the conclusions advanced. This study is too dated, small, and local to cast useful light on this issue, or serve as a basis for extrapolation on the magnitude of the issue.
Excerpted from the cited Rand posting:
The calculation of the cost of financing illegal immigrant health care was made by extrapolating data collected in 2000 and 2001 for a study of about 2,400 immigrants in Los Angeles County.
Thank you.
Tim wouldn’t know peer-reviewed science if it bit him on the ass. The size, scope and date are perfectly adequate, and indeed exceed the metrics for most comparable examinations of the managed care industry.
Let me see if I can understand this, for I must be one of those stupid hicks which you belittle.
So “undocumented adults” (do you mean illegal aliens, those that broke laws entering this country?) account for only $6.4 BILLION. That is a pittance? Maybe for you city folk, but here down on the farm, that’s a bunch’a cash and would sure buy alot of Moon Pies.
So 58% of immigrants (do you mean people like our grandparents who entered the country legally) have health insurance. IS THAT NOT THE POINT? THEY ARE HERE AS PRODUCTIVE MEMBERS OF SOCIETY! What is wrong with them providing for themselves? Why must government now step in, make them drop what they choosen?
What is the point about 30% of (legal) immigrants not getting health care. THAT IS NORMAL throughout the population.
What obsfuscate facts merely to support an unsupportable position?
But then what do I know? I am just one of those little people left wing liberals dispise.
Before your start quoting statistics, get your initial facts correct. There is no such thing as an illegal immigrant! Immigrants, like my grandparents, and probably yours came to this country legally, learned the language, took the citizen test and got their citizenship. The proper term is illegal aliens. These are the folks that want all the benefits without having to pay the price. This country is built on immigrants, and we should be grateful to those who still enter legally.
I agree with Christine that there is a difference with legal immigrants and the illegal aliens. Your statistics are somewhat missleading; you only state the unsured, but what about all the Medicaid dollars spent on this population. Many migrate here just to have their babies born, and we all end up paying for them in the Medicaid and SCHIP programs. People we have serious problems and we all end up paying for it in the long run. The true sacrifices are being made by the working middle class, many work hard and lack adequate healthcare coverage, but because they work hard and own a house many will never qualify for governmental assistance programs.