How American Citizens Finance $18.5 Billion In Health Care For Unauthorized Immigrants
The Apothecary
Chris Conover Contributor
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.
How American Citizens Finance $18.5 Billion In Health Care For Unauthorized Immigrants
