Todays
Fort Worth Star Telegram has an excellent analysis of a study commissioned by the Tarrant County hospital district's board to justify denying undocumented immigrants who live and work in this community medical care. You can read the article at:
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/story/212204.htmlAnd I recommend that you do so before you continue with this journal entry. It is an excellent analysis of a very flawed study. For those who want a quick summary, John Peter Smith (JPS) the public hospital entity commissioned a study to prove that it should keep on doing what it is currently doing---denying health care services to the county's illegal immigrant population.
I will summarize the
Fort Worth Star Telegram article very briefly. The consultant estimates that care for illegal immigrants will cost $40 million the first year as clients descend upon JPS like locusts. However, in 2004 when JPS accepted undocumented immigrants, the demands for services and costs were much lower. And in neighboring Dallas County, where immigrants are treated by the country hospital district, the demand and cost is much lower. Recall that immigrants tend to be younger and healthier than the average U.S. citizen, since most of them have come to this country to work. They are poor, because they have low education, not because they are too ill to work. The consultant did not figure this into his calculation. Instead, he predicted that immigrants would use medical services at the same rate as U.S. citizens living at the same level of poverty.
There are other problems with the JPS position which the
Fort Worth Star Telegram does not explore.
1.
The children of illegal immigrants are most often citizens who are entitled to medical care at clinics like the one that JPS runs.In the article, JPS officials complain that area immigrant leaders have been advising immigrants that their children can use school based free clinics. Why shouldn't they? In their zeal to deny illegal immigrants care, does JPS intend to deny care to their children as well? Actually, it is the often children of immigrants who use social services, not the workers themselves, who are young and healthy.
http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/atissue/AI_406HJAI.pdfAs this policy paper from California points out, many undocumented workers live in households with U.S. citizens--their children. The households consume more social services than they pay in taxes, because of the childrens' need for education and other care. However, as U.S, citizens, whose parents work but make low wages (because of lack of education) they are entitled to these services.
These children will become the American workforce of tomorrow. Since Hispanics have a higher birth rate than Anglos, they will contribute more towards keeping Social Security solvent in the future when the Baby Boomers retire and the U.S. needs all the young workers it can get to keep its economy going. We would not deny our future an education. Does it make sense to deny our future preventive health care?
2.
Illegal immigrants pay taxes, too.Now that they have to have a phony social security number to work, immigrants pay a lot of money into Social Security that they will never see again.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_mz1e10ruben.htmlAccording to this article, $7 billion a year or 10% of the Social Security surplus for 2004. And they pay income tax to the IRS, which knows that they are here illegally and wants their tax dollars so much that it does not notify immigration.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20040415/news_1n15taxes.htmlThey also are buying homes (at inflated interest rates). And like all the working poor in America, they pay local and state sales taxes.
3.
JPS cut the local tax rate by half a cent in August and at the same time said that it was planning to expand its clinic enrollment. These are not the actions of a county hospital system that it is hurting for money. So, why deny immigrant workers, who contribute to our economy by doing necessary jobs that others will not perform, basic preventive health care services? It can not simply be a need to save money. JPS
has money. And anyway, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure when it comes to health care. If immigrants can not get preventive care, they will congest local emergency rooms---maybe even the JPS emergency room---getting expensive tax payer funded care for problems that could have been prevented at a much lower cost.
If the JPS policy is not meant to be fiscally sound, then what is it? A slap in the face towards the workers whom we invite up here to pick our crops and clean our tables and cut our grass, but whom we are all too quick to scapegoat when our economy turns bad for other reasons, like the high price of oil or the trade deficit.
The Republican Party uses fear to mobilize its voting base. In the past, they have fostered fear of African-Americans, fear of Asian-Americans, fear of Drugs, fear of Communism--never caring that civil liberties have been trampled and peoples' lives have been irrevocably harmed. The so called war on illegal immigration is nothing but the latest refrain in their old melody "Let's give the base something to be good and scared of." And attempts like the one above to deny productive workers and their U.S. citizen children basic preventive health care are both unethical and short sighted
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