Texas Hospital Left Holding the Bag for Treating Unaccompanied Children
Coming soon to an emergency room near you
By Andrew R. Arthur on June 1, 2021
Fox News reported last week that the Midland Memorial Hospital has not been paid for more than $200,000 in healthcare it provided to unaccompanied alien children (UACs) whom the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) transferred from the border to the inland city of Midland, Texas. That raises some serious questions, and is a bad sign for costs that will be coming to hospital near you soon.
After Border Patrol apprehends unaccompanied children at the border, it is supposed to transfer those children to HHS custody under a problematic 2008 law. HHS places the UACs in shelters that it has contracts for (the norm) or runs (the emergency fallback).
Most of the children are thereafter placed with “sponsors” in the United States, usually family members — including their parents — most of whom are also here illegally, who often were the ones who paid to have them smuggled here in the first place.
HHS only has about 13,700 permanent shelter beds for those children (cost: $290 per child per day), however, and so in the recent migrant surge, it has had to scramble to set up numerous temporary facilities (cost: $775 per child per day) that can hold more than 16,000 children.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Texas-Hospital-Left-Holding-Bag-Treating-Unaccompanied-Children
