What happens to illegal aliens when they have to go to the ER? Are they turned in? Or do they give an alias? Do they use fake ID?
They get treated and sent a bill like everyone else without insurance. The ER is in the business of healing people. They are not police officers.
Bolding mine. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2013/02/how-undocumented-immigrants-sometimes-receive-medicaid-treatment.html
The article goes on:
Uh, …
Hundreds Of Illegal Immigrants Are Being Deported By U.S. Hospitals. Medical News Today, April 24, 2013.
U.S. Hospitals Quietly Deport Hundreds Of Undocumented Immigrants. Huffington Post, April 23, 2013.
Report: U.S. hospitals deported hundreds of immigrants. CBS News, April 23, 2013.
And how many of those were from the ER? I’m going to hazard a guess, since I haven’t seen the raw data, but it’s probably zero. Those are sick and/or injured inpatients who are being sent back to their home country. I can’t even fathom how that would happen from the ER. It’s not like we have a vacuum tube that we can shove these patients in and have them whisked off to Guatemala. It would takes days to arrange such a transfer, legal or not.
Other than that, yes EMTALA requires us to screen and stabilize these patients regardless of their ability to pay or their immigration status. In practice, we just don’t care and don’t ask. They all get treated the same way. It’s rare that I have any clue as to a patient’s immigration or insurance status.
USCDiver, MD
I didn’t read all of the articles, but the 3rd article makes that exact point:
Note that the last sentence is true regardless of citizenship status.
Same in my ER.
Back to the original question…they get excellent service and we pay the bill. Don’t see why we don’t simply take oil in trade.
They’re told…first, phone home.
WTF???
WTF?
The U. S. purchases significant quantities of oil from Mexico. Should not Mexico take some responsibility for its citizens? Assuming they should, trading their oil for our medical services seems perfectly logical to me.
By this same logic we should force all Americans to purchase health insurance. Shouldn’t the US government force its citizens to be responsible and quite being a burdan on. And if they don’t have home insurance let there house burn. Screw my fellow irresponsible man; Iif we want to claim to be one nation under God and a good Christian country we sbould act like it.
Ignoring for a moment that not all illegals are from Mexico, why would any country be responsible for the health care of its citizens abroad?
True, the articles don’t say they’re being deported directly from the ER. – The ER would keep them, I suppose, until they are stable enough to be removed from the ER, and THEN deport them.
The articles DO say that these deportations are being done illegally, privately by the hospitals, and NOT via any official or government or legal channels. The hospitals are simply loading them onto private chartered jets and sending them to facilities in their own countries, at the hospitals’ expense, which they judge to be cheaper than actually providing any further treatment. The articles tell of cases where this is done while patients are comatose or otherwise unconscious.
The hospitals are in a bind, to be sure. These are going to be very expensive patients, and it’s not clear at all if the hospitals have any chance of getting paid for a lot of them. According to these articles, under PPACA (“Obamacare”), the hospitals may lose some substantial portion of the Medicaid coverage that had been paying.
My point is that the ER isn’t deporting anyone. The sick and injured patients are being admitted to an inpatient unit and then transported to their home country. I’m not saying this practice isn’t deplorable, but the OP asked specifically about illegals getting care in the ER.
I have a co-worker who formerly did billing for the busiest ER in Houston. She said most ER bills are paid. And I don’t know that the unpaid bills skew “illegal”–we’ve got plenty of poor native born Americans…
Yes, most people in the US do have insurance. In most of the ERs I’ve worked in, uninsured or “self pay” patients are around 25% of all the patients seen. There were approximately 130million total ER visits in the US in 2011, so about 43 million visits were for uninsured patients.