Re: Deer in the headlights
Done it about 5 times now for the semi annual tirade against lawyers and immigrants, unfortunately several of the threads were overly consumed by idiots.
I took the time to find the thread with the detailed run down on illegal immigrants. You can look for the thread with the info on malpractice, its even smaller as an impact. My claim of ~80% of health care costs spent in the last year of life has been oft challenged, and just as oft supported by not only globs of reports from medical and insurance organizations, many doctors who use this site have supported the claim.
From an old thread, my post, on illegal immigrant health care costs, just so you know I dont make stuff up and throw it out there because it feels "right":
1. SG points out with good sources that the approximate number of undocumented illegal aliens is ~5M.
2. There are approximately 45M americans without health care (DeNavas-Walt, C., B. Proctor, and R. J. Mills. Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2003. U.S. Census Bureau., August 2004.)
3. The US spends approximately $100B in care for the uninsured. (Institute of Medicine. Hidden Costs, Values Lost: Uninsurance in America. The National Academies Press. 17 June 2003 .)
4. About $34B of that $100B per year is uncompensated/unpaid (same source as above)
5. Another $37B of that $100B is paid by private and public payers of health care for the uninsured. For those who havent ever heard this, an enormous amount of money is available in grants and other programs for the uninsured. My mother in law, a charge nurse, made us all aware of this when she found grants to cover a car accident for my uninsured brother in law...paid all of his bills for free. ($37B number from same source as above)
6. Another $26B is paid out of pocket by the uninsured.
So if we make several presumptions:
- Citizens and documented aliens dont go to the hospital more often than undocumented aliens, and vice versa; I think this is generous since I think undocumented aliens are far less likely to go to a hospital.
- A hospital stay and/or emergency room treatment for a documented alien or citizen is no more or less costly than for an undocumented alien, which I think is also reasonable.
That makes uninsured, uncompensated losses at $34B, spread across the 45 million uninsured and the 5 million illegal aliens. Simple math given the above constraints says 1/10th of the cost is borne by illegal aliens, making this a $3.4B problem.
That makes the unreimbursed illegal alien healthcare problem 3.4% of the total uninsured healthcare "problem". Which is in the vicinity of statistical drift, lost in the noise.
If you care to argue that illegal aliens visit hospitals more often and/or cost more per visit than US citizens, please factor in that as many as 82 million...as much as 1/3 of the US population...spent at least part of 2002 or 2003 without health insurance for some period. See the same US census report above as source for this data.
As overall healthcare in the US reached 1.7 trillion and is estimated at 1.8 trillion in 2004 (3. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group; and U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Economic Analysis and Bureau of the Census) the uninsured costs are a notable problem, but unreimbursed illegal alien healthcare costs become reduced in stature to incredibly irrelevant.