Montco approves funding for anchor baby prenatal care August 25
Believe it or not, I understand and sympathize Chairman Jim Matthews’ reasoning here, which basically amounts to this: If Montco funds prenatal care for the uninsured—most of which are illegal aliens—they will end up saving the hospitals money, since the cost of of a complicated birth can be triple that of a normal birth. Prenatal care can head off most of those complications.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I’m not going to bash Matthews, or the rest of the commissioners, for their stance on this issue; instead I’d like to take this opportunity to point out the very real economic consequences of illegal immigration. Times Herald:
In recent years, Norristown area hospitals have been inundated with Latina women, many of whom have no medical insurance. This year, Montgomery Hospital is projected to deliver more than 1,000 babies, though that number could climb higher, according to local officials. Births skyrocketed this year at the Norristown medical center after Mercy Suburban Hospital in East Norriton closed its obstetrics department.
Why did Mercy Suburban close it’s Obstetrics department?
On average, Montgomery Hospital loses $2,500 for every baby born there and could rack up a total of $16 million in uncompensated care in 2010, according to a hospital official in June.
The statistics on illegal births are elusive and can only be estimated, but those estimates are staggering:
“There’s been anecdotal discussions that nationally right now, as high as 15 percent of all births in the United States are from undocumented mothers, and it is bankrupting out hospitals,” Matthews said.
An estimated 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 were the offspring of “unauthorized immigrants,” according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center released in August.
The figures are based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s March 2009 Current Population Survey, augmented with the Pew Hispanic Center’s analysis of the demographic characteristics of the illegal immigrant population in the U.S.
The analysis finds that nearly four in five, or 79 percent, of the 5.1 million children under the age of 18 of unauthorized immigrants were born in this country and therefore are U.S. citizens. In total, 4 million U.S.-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents lived in this country in 2009 alongside 1.1 million foreign-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.
Accurate estimates of how many Hispanic people live in the Norristown area are elusive, though recent estimates are between 10,000 and 20,000. And though the Norristown medical center is burdened with increasing numbers of uninsured mothers in its obstetrics program, the hospital claims it does not gather data on birth mothers’ immigration status.
“We have births running eight to 12 on a daily basis in Montgomery County in Montgomery Hospital,” Matthews said. “Two weeks ago, there was 13 one day, and the previous Thursday nine or 10, and there’s no (insurance) money.”
Anyone who says that opposition to illegal immigration is rooted solely in bigotry should read this article as many times as it takes to have it sink in. Uninsured illegals are not only bankrupting our hospitals, but they are driving up the cost of insurance for the responsible members of society who are here legally and are insured, since health care providers need to make up the lost revenue somehow. It is federal law that anyone who shows up in a hospital emergency room cannot be turned away from care, yet we are supposed to believe that rising healthcare costs are the fault of greedy insurance companies.
Perhaps if illegal immigrants were denied free healthcare, they wouldn’t be so quick to come to this country. Yet denying healthcare to anyone in need would be inhumane and go against our basic American altruistic spirit. So what is the answer? The Montco Commissioners are stuck between a rock and a hard place, opting instead for the lesser of two evils in order to minimize the economic impact to taxpayers.
Yet our federal government, the very organization that is specifically charged with protecting and enforcing our borders, chooses to ignore this crisis, demonize those who want it addressed, and instead, expand into the healthcare business precisely because of a “crisis” that it helps to create by ignoring and abetting illegal immigration.
This, not bigotry, is the reason that there is a movement afoot to amend the 14th amendment.
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