The most e-mailed story Sunday on
The New York Times Web site is an interesting and disturbing piece about how hospitals in the United States are dealing with immigrant patients who are seriously ill or injured, but have nowhere to go after hospital care.
Some hospitals --
The Times says "many" hospitals -- go so far as to put the patients in helicopters and fly the patients back to their home country.
The story says:
Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it. ... Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician's care in their homeland.
How often does this happen? Often enough that a transportation business has grown up around it.
The Times gives a glimpse:
Some 96 immigrants a year repatriated by St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix; 6 to 8 patients a year flown to their homelands from Broward General Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; 10 returned to Honduras from Chicago hospitals since early 2007; some 87 medical cases involving Mexican immigrants -- and 265 involving people injured crossing the border -- handled by the Mexican consulate in San Diego last year, most but not all of which ended in repatriation. Over all, there is enough traffic to sustain at least one repatriation company, founded six years ago to service this niche --
MexCare, based in California but operating nationwide with a "network of 28 hospitals and treatment centers" in Latin America.
It would be an interesting and important story to find out how your local hospitals are handling this situation. How much are your local hospitals spending on unreimbursed indigent care for immigrants?
