Nowhere to Go, Patients Linger in Hospitals, at a High Cost

[alp227]

Hundreds of patients have been languishing for months or even years in New York City hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing.

As a result, hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in unreimbursed expenses annually while the patients, trapped in bureaucratic limbo, are sometimes deprived of services that could be provided elsewhere at a small fraction of the cost.

“Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based on their clinical need,” said LaRay Brown, a senior vice president for the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation. Under state law, public hospitals are not allowed to discharge patients to shelters or to the street.

Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to leave. Officials in New York City say they have many such patients who are draining money from the health system as the cost of keeping people in acute-care hospitals continues to escalate.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/nyregion/nowhere-to-go-patients-linger-in-hospitals-at-a-high-cost.html?pagewanted=all

Meanwhile, the Drudge Report oversimplified this story as "ILLEGALS MAKING HOSPITALS BANKRUPT!" and you'll hear this talking point repeated on RW radio over and over.

(on edit) I read this article and the one anecdote about a long hospital stay was about a Chinese man who worked as a cook but overstayed a work visa. He was hospitalized with a stroke. His immigration status kept him indefinitely hospitalized for 4 years even after recovery. Neither any private rehab centers, the Chinese government, nor his son living in China would take him, and the hospital even offered to pay for the man to return to China. (I think it's messed up how his son wouldn't want to care for his father after father had a stroke.) The US government ended up granting the man "permanent residen(cy) under color of law" because China wouldn't take him back.

[Tx4obama]

1. OT, but the article reminded me of all the teachers in NY that ....

were sitting in rooms everyday for several years and getting paid because their 'cases' had not been brought to 'trial/review'.
I forget that the name of 'the process' was called but it was really something that shouldn't have happened.
When the story of the 'accused' teachers was brought into the public spotlight - they emptied those 'rooms' and started to fix the problem pretty damn quick!