On Jan 5, 7:10 am, Sordo <
so...@plain.truth.org> wrote:
> Hospitals Stuck With Illegal Immigrants, Uninsured ‘Permanent
> Patients’ at Massive Cost
>
> The Blaze – 10 hrs agohttp://
news.yahoo.com/hospitals-stuck-illegal-immigrant-uninsured-per...
>
> An unpleasant new report claims that many hospitals in major metro
> areas are struggling with the growing problem of “permanent patients.”
>
> What’s a “permanent patient”? According to the New York Times they are
> mostly illegal immigrants or people who lack insurance or their own
> housing that the hospital cannot turn away.
>
> The Times defines a “permanent patient”:
>
> …[someone who has] been languishing for months or even years
> in…hospitals, despite being well enough to be sent home or to nursing
> centers for less-expensive care, because they are illegal immigrants
> or lack sufficient insurance or appropriate housing.
>
> Of course, having dozens of patients hanging around that long means
> these hospitals are absorbing the bill for millions of dollars in
> unreimbursed expenses annually.
>
> Unsurprisingly, the majority of these “permanent patients” are illegal
> immigrants because, as mentioned in the above, they have no housing or
> family in the area.
>
> “Medicaid often pays for emergency care for illegal immigrants, but
> not for continuing care, and many hospitals in places with large
> concentrations of illegal immigrants, like Texas, California and
> Florida, face the quandary of where to send patients well enough to
> leave,” writes Sam Roberts of the Times.
>
> What kind of cost are we talking about here?
>
> “Care for a patient languishing in a hospital can cost more than
> $100,000 a year, while care in a nursing home can cost $20,000 or less
> [emphasis added],” Roberts reports.
>
> Patients fit to be discharged from hospitals but having no place to go
> typically remain more than five years, says LaRay Brown, a senior vice
> president for New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation.
>
> She says that there were about 300 patients in such a predicament
> throughout the New York City area alone, most in public hospitals or
> higher-priced skilled public nursing homes, though a few were in
> private hospitals, according to the Times.
>
> “Many of those individuals no longer need that care, but because they
> have no resources and many have no family here, we, unfortunately, are
> caring for them in a much more expensive setting than necessary based
> on their clinical need,” said Brown.
>
> The report goes on to cite an example where one patient from Queens,
> NY, has been at the Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing
> Facility for 13 years because the hospital has no place to send him.
>
> The patient, who is in his mid-60s, has been there since an arterial
> disease cost him part of one leg below the knee and left him in a
> wheelchair, according to the report.
>
> Or another example:
>
> Five years ago, Yu Kang Fu, 58, who lived in Flushing, Queens, and
> was a cook at a Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, was dropped off by
> his boss at New York Downtown Hospital, a private institution in
> Manhattan, complaining of a severe headache. Mr. Yu was admitted to
> the intensive-care unit with a stroke.
>
> Mr. Yu remained in the hospital for over four years until he was
> transferred last spring to the Atlantis Rehabilitation and Residential
> Health Care Facility, a private center in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, after
> the federal government certified him as a “permanent resident under
> color of law,” essentially acknowledging that he could not be returned
> to China and qualifying him for medical benefits.
>
> “This gentleman cost us millions of dollars,” said Jeffrey Menkes, the
> president of New York Downtown. “We try to provide physical,
> occupational therapy, but this is an acute-care hospital. This patient
> shouldn’t be here.”
>
> The fact of the matter is that hospitals in metro areas that host a
> large illegal immigrant population are unable to turn away patients
> who have neither insurance nor proof that they are in the United
> States legally– two things necessary for discharge purposes and
> reimbursements, said Chui Man Lai, assistant vice president of patient
> services at a New York state hospital.
>
> “These patients often arrive in the emergency room acutely ill and
> unaccompanied, and we have to treat them until they can be discharged
> safely,” Ms. Lai said. “The hospital is required, by law and its
> mission, to care for these patients.”
>
> But even worse than “permanent patients,” those who essentially live
> in hospitals already operating on thin budgets, are what some refer to
> as “pop drops”: grown adults leaving their parents at the hospitals so
> that they can go on vacation.
>
> “Hospitals are reluctant to complain publicly about such patients for
> fear of being perceived as callously seeking to dump nonpaying
> patients,” writes Roberts. “Elected officials are generally loath to
> be seen as encouraging illegal immigrants by changing reimbursement
> formulas. The issue was never addressed during the debate over
> national health care legislation.”
>
> Read the full report
> here.
http://us.lrd.yahoo.com/_ylt=AqZoGcZmtSe7T_cIYeCtO5Kw73QA;_ylu=X3oDMT...
> ___
>
> "Proud To Be Everything Liberals Hate"
Make Mexico pay for treating their shitstains. Air evac to the
border and dump.