How American Citizens Finance $18.5 Billion In Health Care For Unauthorized Immigrants

Forbes ^ | FEB 26, 2018 | Chris Conover

[bitt]

I recently did an interesting interview with Dan Gorenstein, a health care reporter with station WHYY and NPR's radio business show Marketplace on the issue of tax-financed health care for unauthorized immigrants [1]. The piece that aired did not include any of my remarks, but I thought it would be useful to give readers my perspective on this knotty policy question based on both background research I did to prepare for the interview and follow-on research I did in light of the questions posed in the interview.

Current federal policy is to prohibit federal tax funding of health care to unauthorized immigrants through either Medicaid or Obamacare. Nevertheless, rough estimates suggest that the nation's 3.9 million uninsured immigrants who are unauthorized likely receive about $4.6 billion in health services paid for by federal taxes, $2.8 billion in health services financed by state and local taxpayers, another $3.0 bankrolled through "cost-shifting" i.e., higher payments by insured patients to cover hospital uncompensated care losses, and roughly $1.5 billion in physician charity care. In addition to these amounts, unauthorized immigrants likely benefit from at least $0.9 billion in implicit federal subsidies due to the tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals and another $5.7 billion in tax expenditures from the employer tax exclusion.

All told, Americans cross-subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year. Of this total, federal taxpayers provided $11.2 billion in subsidized care to unauthorized immigrants in 2016.

In this post, I describe in more detail current policy, current sources of funding for health care of unauthorized immigrants. In a follow-on post, I will offer four independent reasons federal tax funding for such care is a bad idea (that is, a reader need only accept one, not all, in order to conclude we should dispense with such..

[Steely Tom]

18.5 billion? It’s sad but I have a hard time believing the number is that low.

At least four times that, probably five.

[oldtech]

The “president” Obama should have been called out at many times for many things & healthcare for illegals was only one. I never could figure out why Obama wasn’t criticized about 100 times more than Pres. Trump has been.

[seowulf]

Just so everyone understands...18 billion is NASA’s budget.

What’s worth more?

I think I've just thought of a way to save 36 billion dollars.

[monkeyshine]

It can’t be that low. Total health care subsidies approaches $700 billion. Assuming 11 million illegal residents and even proportional breakdown, it would be at least $22 billion. If you use the 20 million number, it would over $40 billion.

And I don’t think this number includes what is spent by the states and counties, and what is written off by hospitals as noncollectable receivables. We hear the counties complain about the cost all the time.

[KIDFOH]

I think we call that a ‘civil war’. It might not be far off.

[CodeToad]

The War of Northern Aggression is going to look much more civil than what is about to happen. This next one is going to look a lot like genocide.

[CodeToad]

“I think I’ve just thought of a way to save 36 billion dollars. “

Nailed it. I was thinking the same thing. “Gee, that sounds like a total of $36 billion we don’t need to spend.”

[SunkenCiv]

Note: this topic is from 11/17/2018. Thanks bitt.