Immigration Pushes Up Health Care Costs

Health care is a major issue today, and a topic of intense debate. Unfortunately, the debate rarely touches on the very significant impact of immigration, legal and illegal, on our spiraling health costs.

To understand that impact we should begin by considering that our current policies of legal immigration are admitting people who are, on average, less skilled and educated than native-born Americans. This is even more the case with illegal immigrants. As a consequence, the foreign-born earn less than the native-born, which means that they put a disproportionate burden on public services, including medical care.

According to the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), “34 percent of immigrants lack health insurance, compared with 13 percent of natives.” CIS also found that “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 71 percent of the uninsured since 1989.” Legal immigrants make use of public health care services such as Medicaid. While illegal aliens themselves are barred from the program, they can receive Medicaid benefits for their U.S. born children.

Illegal aliens also make extensive use of hospital emergency rooms, quite commonly for non-emergency medical services. Being unable or unwilling to pay for those services, they have imposed a heavy enough financial burden on many care centers to push them to—and over—the brink of bankruptcy.

Providing medical care for people who don’t pay their way causes the cost of health care to rise for everyone else, through higher fees and higher insurance premiums. Thus if we were serious about cutting health care costs, a good place to start would be a reduction of legal immigration. After all, we have no legal or moral obligation to keep the floodgates open to the largest sustained wave of immigration in our history. And we have even less reason to allow massive illegal immigration to continue.

Unfortunately, President Obama, a strong supporter of health care reform, is not proposing less legal immigration as a solution. As for illegal immigration, he proposes amnesty (legal status and the pathway to citizenship) for illegal aliens, a policy which is bound to increase illegal immigration by rewarding it.

Obama and leading congressional Democrats, however, have promised that their health care legislation will not allow illegal aliens to participate. Even so, their subsequent words and actions offer little cause for comfort. After saying that illegals should be excluded, Obama indicated that after amnesty illegal aliens would no longer be illegal, and thus they would be eligible for the benefits of the health care program.

Supporters of health care legislation in Congress point to language in the bills barring illegal aliens. But it is clear that many of those supporters don’t want that language to have any teeth. Rep. Dean Heller (R-NV) offered an amendment to the legislation in the House Ways and Means Committee to require screening of applicants to determine their legal status. The amendment was voted down.

As if it mattered those who voted no, a recent Rasmussen Poll found that 70 percent of Americans oppose inclusion of illegal aliens in any health care legislation. Those Americans will have to raise their voices and make their conviction understood in Washington. On immigration in general, our lawmakers need to heed the message that America can’t be the hospital of the entire world.