Yesterday KTRH-740 reported that Harris County taxpayers paid $97 million in health care costs for illegal immigrants last year:
KTRH has learned the Harris County Hospital District is shelling out millions of dollars every year to treat people who are here in this country illegally.
When you subtract what patients paid for hospital district services, and money from federal grants and other sources, $97.3 million dollars is what the local property taxpayer subsidized the district budget for undocumented immigrant care in 2005. That’s 14 percent of the entire hospital system’s operating budget.
Today the Chronicle has more:
Commissioner Steve Radack, who requested the report on the district’s costs of treating undocumented immigrants, said county residents are shouldering a burden created by the federal government.
The federal government doesn’t prevent illegal immigration, but hardly reimburses local counties where the immigrants most frequently settle and use public health care facilities, he said.
“The federal government allows people to come here illegally,” Radack said. “Because of that the cost shouldn’t fall on the local taxpayer.”
The district treated more than 57,000 illegal immigrants last year, at a cost of $128 million. The federal and state governments reimbursed about $28 million, and the patients themselves paid about $3 million. Over the past 11 years, the district has paid about $607 million in unreimbursed costs for treating undocumented immigrants.
The district does not directly ask patients if they are in the country legally, but infers their status from other information gleaned during patient screenings, officials said.
And this is only for the county hospitals. Chris Baker was discussing this yesterday and one of his callers identified herself as an employee of a private, fourteen-hospital group here in the Houston area. She said they routinely write off anywhere from 40 to 60 surgeries each week, because the patients are here illegally and are unable to pay. She said the paperwork will often have Social Security numbers such as 111-11-1111, or 999-99-9999, and bogus addresses, but since hospitals are prohibited from turning anyone away, there is nothing they can do about it.
