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April 13, 2009
AN EDITORIAL
Our Leaders Betray Us – Public Health and Social Impact
Our immigration laws should
protect not only the individuals of this country from disease, but our
resources from unsustainable use. These
are modern times and medicine can fix many things now, but diseases still
matter, and treating disease and injury has become terribly expensive. In recent decades we have opened our
hospitals to anyone who walks in, and the bills wind up being paid by the
public—or the hospitals go out of business. If we were infinitely rich we could afford to
be infinitely generous, but we are not infinitely rich. Our national medical resources should not be
expended on those who have no right to be here.
Health screening goes on for those who come legally to the
U.S, especially for those who come to reside here. “Imported” diseases among our population of
legal aliens have not presented a demonstrable threat to the health of the people
of this country.
Illegal aliens, however, are another matter. They undergo no health screening, so we have
no idea what any individual may bring.
We can say that as a group, though, they bring diseases we have not seen
here in decades. For instance,
tuberculosis, leprosy, and dysentery show up now along the border with
Mexico. There are pork tapeworm
infestations in Texas, and Northern Virginia has seen outbreaks of tropical
diseases brought to this country from Africa and Asia. Washington State and California have huge
populations of illegal aliens. Those states also present tuberculosis cases far
beyond the normal range—that is no coincidence. The medical literature is out
there to back this position up for those who are incapable of seeing the common
sense version of it, which is this: millions
of illegal aliens come from third world countries with third world diseases and
health and sanitation practices. Through
their ignorance of modern health practices and sanitation, these individuals
become disease vectors as they prepare and serve our food, clean our rooms, and
care for our children and elderly. Our
leaders seem incapable of grasping this simple fact: there are good reasons
that illegal aliens should not be allowed to run free in this country by the
million. The threat to our health is one
of those reasons, yet our leaders betray us by permitting it. Why?
We must demand an answer.
Protection of public health has been a goal of immigration
laws since the first ones were adopted in the 19th century. It has
only been in recent decades, though, that public services have become an
issue—and they have become a big one. To
be blunt, medical care for illegal aliens is running many hospitals into the
ground financially, and their use of fraudulent identification is corrupting
many of the security nets that have been put in place to take care of our
own.
The major culprit is the blind generosity of our own
Congress with our money. The federal
Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) demands that
emergency rooms treat anyone who enters claiming to be suffering from an
emergency—and the patient gets to define what is an emergency. Naturally, when there is a poor population (we
are not speaking of just illegal aliens – yet)
with no access to other sources of medical care, the
emergency room becomes their clinic of necessity. They cannot be blamed for that; if you hurt,
you find a doctor. And since it is free
to them, it gets used for anything, big or small. It may be a gunshot wound or it may be a
headache, but the hospital must treat the problem or face disciplinary action
or fines by the government.
Even if the problem is simple enough to fix with a one-cent
aspirin, though, the cost of dealing with that patient is high. Medical staff gets paid the same whether they
are treating a hangover or a hernia.
Administrative personnel must go through the same reams of paperwork
regardless of how simple the medical problem might be. Eventually, the unreimbursed costs add up to
the point that they are no longer sustainable, and since most hospitals are
for-profit enterprises, they close their doors, unable to keep going. Hospitals in areas with large populations of
illegal aliens are in the worst shape, with California having lost 70 hospitals
and trauma centers to economic closure between 1990 and 2004. The same thing is going on across the country
in metropolitan areas with large poor populations. Texas, Florida, New Jersey;
all have seen hospitals shut down. And
the quality of services is being impacted by sheer volume of patients nearly
everywhere there are large numbers of poor.
The undiscussed secret is this, an elephant in the living
room: if we did not have so many illegal
aliens here we would not have so many poor people. That is so for two reasons. First, the illegal aliens themselves are
poor, often working poor, but poor nevertheless. And second, by their presence, they depress
wages and working conditions and outright take jobs that ought to be held by
American workers. Illegal aliens keep
millions of Americans poor, and thus forced to draw on public support, as well
as the fact that the aliens themselves draw on public facilities. They are a drag on our medical services
system in ways we cannot afford.
Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty in 1965. So far, we have not won that war, or even
made a dent in poverty. The reason is
that we keep importing reinforcements for the other side. If we made the uncounted millions of illegal
aliens go home by depriving them of jobs and the other benefits of our society
we would improve the lives of equal millions of our own people, primarily our
own poor. In the practice of medicine,
this is called triage. That is, you can’t save everyone, so allocate
limited resources to save those whom you can, or in this case, whom you
should. Illegal aliens are those whom we
can no longer afford to allocate resources to.
We never could, of course, but we are just now finding that out the hard
way. Human decency demands that if we permit them to be here, even invite them
by default, as we have for years, we should treat their emergencies, but the
real solution is to make sure they aren’t here at all.
We should demand that our leaders explain to us why they
permit this. They not only permit it,
but enable and encourage and abet it by refusing to undertake meaningful
immigration enforcement efforts that would make the U.S. inhospitable to
illegal aliens, thus causing them to go home.
Why are our leaders betraying an entire class of Americans, the poor, by
allowing millions of illegal aliens to take what rightfully belongs to those
who belong here? They owe us an answer,
a clear one that means something to the person who can’t find a decent job any more
and is thus condemned to poverty.
Kent
Lundgren
Chairman
National
Association of Former Border Patrol Officers
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