You know we have done the whole "Let us simply declare illegals legal and then become serious about controlling the borders..." bit three times. And each time, the sudden legalization results in no improvement in the continuation of illegal immigration and has always resulted in a net drain on social entitlements now "legally" paid to the former illegals. Making illegals legal so they are qualified for government health care entitlements won't solve the medical cost gaps we have now.
If I thought legalizing them would work, I'd be all for it.
Understand this simple and indisputable point. If you seal the borders, expel current illegals, and introduce a sane streamlined and simple immigration policy to legally allow people to come to the country, you would in turn see many- if not all- problems caused by having 10-15 million illegals draining entitlements of funding cease to be a problem. Over night if you adopted my point 3 solution, hospitals could resume their former charity towards those legally in the country who no have no other access to emergency health care.
It really is that simple.
ANY PLAN ADVOCATED BY ANYONE THAT DOES NOT ADDRESS ILLEGAL ALIEN COSTS INCURRED BY HEALTH CARE IS EITHER A SHAM OR A POLITICAL PAYOFF.
Period. End of story. Access to health care is not the issue. Thanks to national and state laws, anyone needing health care is granted that care regardless of the cost of that care or their ability to pay. The problem is that illegals after receiving such health care do not provide the hospitals with any means of service recovery even on a wholesale basis. The result is hospitals are either shutting down or instituting draconian measures against one of the few costs they can control- namely employee compensation and doctor reimbursements.The hospitals are collectively telling their workers to work for less because between 10 and 30% of the customers do not pay a dime.
Watch as Obama's Health plan suddenly includes a unionization plan to set national wage standards and force unionization as a means to effect a controlled spending environment. It will be a boon to the AFL/CIO, but won't save a cent and put the nail in the coffin of people having an economic incentive to become a health care worker.
You think there are health care access problems now? Wait until the nursing and doctor shortage becomes exacerbated by the fact that 10 years of schooling and hundreds of thousands of dollars of tuition debt makes no sense if it only nets you a job that makes you 50k a year and is no longer a profession but instead a regulated skilled trade governed by a national union.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Legalize Illegals and Save Healthcare
Sunday, May 3, 2009
National Health Care
Actually a lot of people choose not to have health care. The bulk of people who are legal citizens or aliens without healthcare coverage also happen to be between 18 and 25 years of age. The time in people's lives where short of a catastrophic accident, they tend not to need even a doctors visit. It is also the time in people's lives where they get starter jobs and have other priorities to pay for such as housing or taking a cue from Tommy, beer money.
The 40 odd million uninsured that keeps getting bandied about is made up of between 10 and 15 million illegals, 20 odd million young adults, and 10 million people who could truely be considered to be without health care due to economics or chronic conditions that make it impossible to get private insurance.
If you want to fix health care...
1 Institute a mandatory insurance pool for otherwise omitted pre-existing chronic disease.
2. Replace the current medicare/medicaid payment system with one that pays net 15 days, pays the actual cost of procedures, and criminalizes abuse by both patient and provider in cases of fraud with draconian mandatory prison terms.
3. In cases of illegals receiving health care, if they are incapable of paying
If you do those 3 things healthcare would effectively cover the 10 million people who need it but cannot get it. It would solve the problem of private insurance subsidizing the unrecovered expenses of Medicare/Medicaid. And would eliminate the current drain of funds from most large hospitals as a result of treating illegal aliens.
It doesn't take a National Healthcare plan to solve these problems. And if you did enact a National Health Plan as offered by Obama, it specifically does not address these three problems and potentially exacerbates problems 2 and 3.
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