Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals

[AlphaCentauri]

Source: NYT

JOLOMCÚ, Guatemala — High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

Shooing away flies and beaming at the tiny, toothless elderly mother who is his sole caregiver, Mr. Jiménez, a knit cap pulled tightly on his head, remains cheerily oblivious that he has come to represent the collision of two deeply flawed American systems, immigration and health care.

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/03deport.html?bl&ex=1217908800&en=8cf38e35a8549324&ei=5087%0A

[AlphaCentauri]

1. For some ill migrants, free care has a price

When Fidel Delgado arrived at a Catholic hospital in Phoenix in mid-June after a heart attack, doctors performed life-saving bypass surgery, even though Delgado is an undocumented immigrant with no way to pay his medical bills.

Federal law requires hospitals to provide emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay.

But once Delgado had been stabilized, officials at St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center faced a serious dilemma: As a hospital certified for acute, or short-term, care, St. Joseph's determined that it couldn't keep Delgado any longer. But the severely diabetic and obese man was still too sick to go home.
...
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St. Joseph's now sends an average of seven uninsured immigrants a month back to their native countries for treatment, often against the wishes of family members, hospital officials say. Before 2000, the hospital rarely transferred any patients out of the country, perhaps only two or three times a year, the officials said.

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2008/08/03/20080803hospitals0803.html

more about this

[saigon68]

3. St. Joseph's Hospital and Medical Center

What more can you say

Obviously the spirit of the saint didn't affect their decision

[AlphaCentauri]

5. These days Saints are becoming advocates of the health care free market

[Lance_Boyle]

2. not immigrants - illegal aliens.

Note to media: these two terms are NOT interchangeable.

[AlphaCentauri]

4. from the dictionary

immigrant

–noun
1. a person who migrates to another country, usually for permanent residence.
2. an organism found in a new habitat.
–adjective
3. of or pertaining to immigrants and immigration: a department for immigrant affairs.
4. immigrating.

[alstephenson]

6. Note to Lance:

Two of the instances noted refer to the LEGAL status of the immigrants.....sorry to burst your racist bubble.

"In May, the family of Sonia del Cid Iscoa, A LEGAL IMMIGRANT who has been living in the U.S. for 17 years, went to court to block St. Joseph's from shipping the comatose woman back to her native Honduras. The hospital eventually agreed to allow Iscoa to remain at the hospital, and she later became well enough to go home."

"In June, St. Joseph's arranged to transfer Antonio de Jesus Torres Aguayo, 19, A LEGAL PERMANENT U.S. RESIDENT who had suffered a head injury in a rollover accident near Gila Bend, to a hospital in Mexicali, just over the Mexican border from California. But at the border, family members had to call for a Mexican ambulance to meet them, and officials at the hospital in Mexico gave conflicting reports about whether they knew Torres was coming.

Torres was later accepted at a hospital in El Centro, Calif., and a rehabilitation center in San Diego. California is paying his medical bills through an assistance program, according to his father, Jesus Torres of Gila Bend."