Sunday, June 18, 2006

EMERGENCY! Everybody to get from street!

There was a Quicksilver Messenger Service song that has a lyric that goes "Your newspapers just lead you on... They never tell you the whole story" That was going through my head earlier this week when while sailing I heard this story on WCBS Newsradio out of New York. It was also picked up by the Washington Post about the crisis in hospital emergency rooms. How many are closing or are diverting patients because they are overwhelmed by the influx of patients. But, of course none of the mainstream media mentioned anything about the influx of illegal immigrnats using the emergency rooms for their medical services. There were over 13,000 uses of emergency room services for non emergency use in New York State by illegal immigrants in 2004. But, the problem isn't only in New York you can see the problem here, here, here and here. Maybe the mainstream media like CBS News and the Washingto Post will dig a little deeper next time they report and give us the whole story.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

it is actually illegal for any hospital to deny care to ANYONE if they get one penny from the federal government -- i would be the first one to alert MALDEF or LULAC to make sure the hospitals in question get their asses handed to them in federal court. Besides i thought Doctors took an oath of some sort that conflicts with your draconian position of complete denial of healthcare. Any Dr. worth his/her degree will tell you that preventive care is a lot less expensive then emergency health care. That is a key aspect of the cost. But why i am wasting my time, no one else seems to; you have established your xenophobic take on the issue... that much is certain. You side like those fun loving German folks in 1933 -- before the real fun started.

Capt. Mike said...

Anon:
You just want to ignore the hidden costs of illegal immigrants. This is just another aspect of the illegal immigrant problem not addressed by the Senate in Washington. Somebody pays to provide medical services for illegal immigrants because they certainly don't. The costs are just passed along in higher medical costs to U.S. citizens and because the illegals don't pay for the medical services they get. Even l8iberal economists like Paul Krugman admits that the social services provided to illegal immigrants are costing U.S. taxpayers with statement like "modern America is a welfare state, even if our social safety net has more holes in it than it should — and low-skill immigrants threaten to unravel that safety net."