🚀 go-pugleaf

"Lets Roll" <letsroll@meet-me-in-hell.com> wrote in message news:<108vd8saff4eob9@corp.supernews.com>...
> http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2004/04/26/story3.html
> An undocumented expense
> Caring for undocumented immigrants is further straining financially ailing
> Grady
> Megan Woolhouse
> Staff Writer
> Omar Morales can't move, speak or eat on his own. After a car wreck last
> December, the undocumented immigrant from Mexico City lay for months at
> Grady Memorial Hospital in a coma, his future uncertain. Before he was taken
> off a ventilator in March, keeping him alive cost the hospital as much as
> $3,000 a day -- or $125 an hour.
> 
> In recent months, he has moved from the hospital to Crestview Nursing
> Facility, owned by Grady Health System, and back to the hospital again,
> according to a friend. In either place, his care is expensive. At Crestview,
> it cost about $1,000 a day, said Dr. Leon Haley, chief of medicine for
> emergency service at Grady.
> Grady, which already treats more uninsured patients than any other hospital
> in the state, gets only 7 percent of its revenue from patients with private
> insurance. More than 40 percent of its patients in 2003 qualified for
> Medicaid, a program for low-income families, and the hospital faces a $63
> million debt.
> Experts say Grady and other large nonprofit hospitals across the country are
> starting to buckle under the heavy volume of uninsured they treat.
> Grady CEO Dr. Andrew C. Agwunobi has warned repeatedly in recent months that
> the hospital could face closure. And he said the hospital simply cannot
> afford any added burden of care for patients like Morales and other
> undocumented, uninsured patients. Although nothing is official, Grady
> doctors have even considered finding a way to buy Morales a plane ticket
> back to Mexico.
> "We believe [as a society that] we ought to be humane," Agwunobi said in an
> interview. "But we don't always think of who pays for that."
> Between 1990 and 2000, the number of undocumented immigrants in Georgia rose
> 300 percent from 33,000 to 226,000, according to U.S. Citizenship and
> Immigration Services. That mirrors a nationwide trend. Experts believe there
> are currently as many as 10 million undocumented immigrants, including
> children and the elderly,living in the United States.
> Most are working, but they don't have health insurance, which sometimes
> causes them to ignore health problems until they reach a crisis proportion,
> then seek care in hospital emergency rooms, doctors said. Federal law
> requires hospital staff to treat all emergency room arrivals regardless of
> their ability to pay. But often those costs are paid by hospitals, taxpayers
> and private insurance policy holders through higher premiums.
> Grady's Haley said doctors at Grady see situations like Morales' once or
> twice a month.
> "In some scenarios, we've had difficulty identifying who the people are" due
> to a lack of documentation, he said.

And native-born senior citizens go without food to pay for their
medications. For shame on our government for it's failure to patrol
the southern border.

Ralph