Now here’s a real poser
Why do you think the Maricopa Medical Center is increasingly overwhelmed?
This requires a good bit of reading. The article takes front and center placement of the daily’s Valley section, continuing for most of an interior page. Buried on page six is the explanation:
The emergency department cares for people from throughout the Valley, although most come from neighborhoods that surround the hospital, near Roosevelt and 24th streets in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood. Many of those people are high-risk and use the ER instead of a primary-care doctor.
Be warned and hang on tightly to your billfold. After describing the overworked staff and “aging” facility, the case is made for replacing the “almost 40 year old structure and its outdated layout that creates challenges in delivering medicine in today‘s marketplace.”
The emergency department and trauma center are part of Maricopa Integrated Health System, a $430 million organization funded partly through a property tax approved by county voters. The system treats 400,000 people yearly, reports the paper
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May 11, 2008 at 5:22 pm
Have you ever had the occasion to be in ANY emergency room–let alone this one in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood? The entire family of the sick or injured patient sit in the waiting area with all of their children and the television on a Spanish language channel, while the rest of us have to stand or go outside. It is rude and infuriating. I’ve seen this more than once. Why don’t the hospitals have some enforceable rules that disallow this?
May 11, 2008 at 7:13 pm
Other facilities throughout the country get hard use and are “almost 40 years old.” Many are much older. When money is tight, as it certainly is now, government needs to make do. Betsey Bayless, the MMC Chief Executive Officer, could take a pay cut! She’s making nearly $400,000 a year!
May 11, 2008 at 10:15 pm
Hospital emergency rooms were never intended to replace private physicians. Nor were the citizen taxpayers intended to provide medical care to those who have illegally invaded our county. That’s the job of Mexico. I’d be very interested to know what percentage of the patients are in this country illegally.
THAT would be the story!
May 11, 2008 at 10:40 pm
Just let them try to get people to approve a higher property tax in this day and age- especially when it’s tied to more services for illegals! As soon as the illegals hear that there is a new hospital with less of a wait, they head right over. We need to quit being so PC and start demanding that their extended families get booted out of the emergency room waiting areas. Listen to Spanish language channels? No way- I’d be demanding the remote!
May 12, 2008 at 9:36 am
You stole my thunder,Thomas. That was a well stated comment.
The number of illegals who are being treated on the backs of American citizen taxpayers would indeed be the story. Don’t expect THAT from the AZ Republic.
May 12, 2008 at 3:05 pm
Kudos to Thomas and Joe Evans for pointing out and articulating four of the real issues here - illegals exploiting citizen taxpayer-funded resources, inappropriate use of medical facilities, runaway compensation for administrators and aging infrastructure. Build a border fence and you’ll see three out of four of these problems diminish dramatically.
May 12, 2008 at 3:44 pm
RA:
The idea of building a border fence is great but amazingly unacceptable to the Feds. I’d vote for a filled moat.
May 12, 2008 at 6:49 pm
The following was attributed to NewsWithViews.com - it may put things in perspective:
$346 BILLION ILLEGAL ALIEN COSTS: HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES
By Frosty Wooldridge
May 8, 2008
NewsWithViews.com
Every month, month in and month out, year in and year out, your U.S. senators and House representatives along with President Bush allow 182,000 legal and illegal immigrants to move into America—give or take a few hundred thousand. By years end, they total 2.18 million virtually uneducated, unskilled and lack English language abilities while arriving with a plethora of diseases and other health care needs.
Who pays? You do! How much? Each year, you shell out $346 billion in taxes to pay for those immigrants across 15 federal agencies.
The Department of Health and Human Services spent $672.9 billion in 2007 according to financial analyst Edwin S. Rubenstein.
“Immigrants are poorer, pay less tax, and are more likely to receive public benefits than American citizens,” said Edwin Rubenstein, reporting on the National Research Council’s new book: “The New Americans: Economic, Demographics and Fiscal Effects of Immigration.” The Social Contract Winter 2007-08. http://www.thesocialcontract.com
When legal immigrants arrive, your tax dollars funnel into their “Individual Development Accounts.” You pay them $1.00 for every dollar they place into a saving account. They receive up to $4,000.00 per household. In other words, they could not sustain themselves when they arrived, so you pay for them to stay. Neat government trick, huh?!
Congress pays out $25 million of your tax dollars annually to this little toilet bowl financial hole. Bush wants to add 900,000 accounts this year.
“In 2006, 38 million U.S. residents were foreign born,” Rubenstein said. “Most immigrants are poorly educated and lack basic skills required for middle class jobs, which include health benefits. Immigrants account for 59 percent of uninsured people.”
Latino immigrants do not get immunized, suffer higher rates of TB, experience higher obesity rates, suffer dental carries and use drugs, tobacco and alcohol. They rarely use contraception, which can be seen in their exploding unwed mother birth rates. Thus immigrants account for a disproportionate share of Medicaid spending.
“Currently Congress considers an expansion of benefits to 400 percent of the poverty line–$83,000.00 for a family of four,” Rubenstein said. “Approximately 6.7 million children and adults are covered. In 2006, federal expenditures totaled $5.5 billion. About $605 million was spent on immigrants.”
Adding to this bombshell cost assessment for legal and illegal immigrants; the “Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act of 1985” requires hospitals to serve illegal aliens who seek emergency care. Your tax collars pay $167 million for illegal aliens.
Drug addiction and alcoholism make up the fastest “disabilities” illegal aliens claim in our ER hospitals:
In 1983: 3,000 cases
In 1994: 101,000 cases
In 2003: 325,000 cases
“EMTALA givers illegals more than medical treatment. A “disability” diagnosis automatically qualifies them for immediate cash transfer payments,” Rubenstein said. “The numbers are staggering.”
127,900 illegals on SSI in 1982
601,400 illegals in 1992
2,000,000 illegals in 2003
While they use our medical services, illegal and legal immigrants send cash transfers back home to their own countries in excess of $80 billion annually. Mexico alone receives $23 billion annually. All the while, they send our working poor into the unemployment lines or welfare.
As reported two weeks ago by Brian Williams at NBC, “Twenty-eight million Americans received food stamps in the month of April.”
Dr. Steve Camarota of http://www.cis.org said, “The persistently high rate of welfare use by immigrant households is almost entirely explained by their heavy reliance on Medicaid, use of which has actually risen.”
Of special note, 86 hospitals and ER’s bankrupted out of existence in California in the past six years. Why? That state houses 4,000,000 illegal aliens.
When you combine the figures of the phenomenon of 400,000 babies born each year in the USA to illegal mothers, the costs in human services reaches into the billions and billions of dollars. All from American taxpayers! But it doesn’t stop there! Taxpayers must shell out their money to pay for K-12 education along with ESL and breakfasts and lunch programs for our new poor class.
With America importing 182,000 more legal and illegal immigrants every 30 days, it’s a matter of time before more schools fail to educate, more hospitals bankrupt and prisons explode with added prisoners from foreign lands.