Immigration looms as the next test for Congress

Is Congress, behindhand on Barack Obama's deadlines on health care and cap-and-trade legislation, and flummoxed by the failure of the stimulus package to hold unemployment below 10.2 percent, prepared to address the immigration issue next year?

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says it better be. The current situation, she told the Center for American Progress on Nov. 13, "is simply unacceptable." We need a "three-legged stool," with provisions to strengthen enforcement, legalize some illegal immigrants and improve "legal flows for families and workers."

Ironically, the push for legalization in 2006-07 resulted instead in stronger enforcement measures. Some 600 miles of border fence have been built, the Border Patrol has been vastly expanded and ...

The 1965 and 1986 laws resulted in a large illegal immigrant population because they promised things that proved beyond the capacity of government to deliver.

Dialysis unit closing hits illegal immigrants hard

Some knew before the crossing that they had diabetes or lupus or high blood pressure, but it was only after they arrived that their kidneys began to fail. To survive, they needed dialysis at a cost of about $50,000 a year, which their sporadic work as housekeepers, painters and laborers could not begin to cover.

And so they turned to Grady, a taxpayer-supported safety-net hospital that would provide dialysis to anyone in need, even illegal immigrants with no insurance or ability to pay. Every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning, the 15 or so patients would settle into their recliners, four to a room, and while away the monotonous three-hour treatments by chitchatting in Spanish.

That all changed on Oct. 4, when the strapped public hospital closed its outpatient dialysis clinic, leaving 51 patients — almost all illegal immigrants — in a life-or-death limbo.

La Familiia indictments in Chicago, IL

The Mexican drug cartels have established supply lines and distribution networks in more 230 American localities, and Chicago, IL is one of them where yesterday fifteen defendants with alleged ties to La Familia Michoacana were indicted as reported by Mike Robinson for the Chicago Tribune: The people charged in indictments returned Thursday were arrested in August as part of the government's Operation Coronado, an effort launched in 2007 to break La Familia's grip on the U.S. cocaine market. * * * Drug Enforcement Agency officials have arrested more than 300 people in 19 states as part of the operation, prosecutors said.

It's my understanding that we dialysis patients account for up to 2/3 of Medicare expenditures. The problem is that, given regular dialysis, we tend to live for a long time -- if we also follow a particular diet and take care of ourselves.

Without dialysis, though, we die.

Guess which treatment regime is most likely to take it in the shorts under Obamacare...

You might say that, for dialysis patients, Obamacare really is a matter of life...and death.

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