>Massey cannot know that because illegals going to hospitals do not
>a;ways say they are illegals and hospitals do not track such
>information, therefore there is no way to know how much is spent on
>their healthcare. See:
Just happened to be poking around for some studies on this. The GAO says it cannot estimate the impact of undoc'd immigrants on hospitals' uncompensated care costs <http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d04472.pdf>. But emergency Medicaid expenditures in 10 states with large immigrant populations - which would include coverage for citizens and noncitizens alike - was $2 billion in 2002, less than 3% of the total. A study of immigrant health care costs (Mohanty et al, "Health Care Expenditures of Immigrants in the United States: A Nationally Representative Analysis," American Journal of Public Health 95:8 (August 2005),found total health expenditures on immigrants was $40 billion in 1998 - 4% of total expenditures that year - but $25b was paid out-of-pocket, and just $12b by government. Another study (Castel et al, "Toward estimating the impact of changes in immigrants' insurance eligibility on hospital expenditures for uncompensated care," BMC Health Services Research 2003, 3:1 <http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6963/3/1>) found no relation at all between the share of a state's foreign-born population and hospitals' uncompensated costs. What matters: the share of uninsured residents. Even alarmist studies by anti-immigrant groups <http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/fiscal.pdf> estimate the net cost to the feds at $10 billion, a ludicrously tiny 0.4% of federal expenditures.
And finally, to quote the translated name of a Dutch group: No Person Is Illegal.
Doug