Immigration Law

Even Legal Immigrants Receive Inadequate Medical Care in U.S.

By Robert Kraft

The New York Times recently ran a very long, but important, article about medical care received in the United States by immigrants. The gist of the story is that the medical care is inadequate, regardless of the immigrant's legal status. This is shocking - many legal immigrants in the U.S. receive poor medical care perhaps for the simple reason that they are immigrants. I urge you to read the article. Here are a few very short excerpts:

Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Antonio Torres’s experience sharply illustrates the haphazard way in which the American health care system handles cases involving uninsured immigrants who are gravely injured or seriously ill. Whether these patients receive sustained care in this country or are privately deported by a hospital depends on what emergency room they initially visit.

There is only limited federal financing for these fragile patients, and no governmental oversight of what happens to them. Instead, it is left to individual hospitals, many of whom see themselves as stranded at the crossroads of a failed immigration policy and a failed health care system, to cut through a thicket of financial, legal and ethical concerns.

An examination by The Times of cases across the country involving seriously injured and ill immigrants shows patients at the mercy of hospitals and hospitals at the mercy of a system that provides neither compensation nor guidance. Taken together, the cases reveal a playbook of improvised responses, from aggressive to compassionate.

Full post as published by Immigration Law Answers Blog on November 10, 2008 (boomark / email).