Illegals & health care
Illegals & health care
There are probably 20 million illegal aliens in the US and, according to another recent article in the News, 250,000 families of illegal aliens (which means (750,000 actual people) live in Colorado. My question, Dr. VanderArk is this: how many of the 47 million across the US and 770,000 in Colorado who you say are uninsured, are illegal aliens? I don’t see any breakout of that in your article.
Dr. VanderArk may be able to shrug off (or more likely, dodge) his share of the taxpayer cost of insuring all these illegal aliens, but my family cannot. And nobody—least of all well-to-do do-gooders like Dr. VanderArk—is offering to pay our health insurance.
J.M. Schell
Arvada
This letter has not been edited.
The number of 47 million people in the US who have no health insurance is a falacious and misleading piece of data. Do you know how you get on that list? If you are without insurance for a day, you get on the list. I was on that list in '06 as I was out of work for 4 months and had no insurance. Much of the list is made of people like me who are in transition. Most of the list is 18 - 25 year olds who do not want it, as they are generally healthier than the population as a whole and choose to "pay as they go". The number on the list who are illegal could be in the millions too. The left loves to throw this number around as being "static". The same 47 million people with no insurance - ever. In fact, the list is dynamic and is always changing as people move, get new jobs, move up the career ladder, etc. Just as the number 4.5% is accepted as "full employment" to reflect a dynamic workforce, there will always be people without health insurance for a variety of reasons. There is no crisis and do not accept this number to indicate there is.
Posted by Michael on January 23, 2007 07:08 AMMichael, I think you are missing the point of that list.
It is well known that there is a transitory number of people that flit though the list because they are uninsured for a few days or weeks as they change employers, find a new insurer, change marital status, etc. Everybody is also quite aware that there are some youngsters (and others) who opt out willingly because of various reasons.
Those are accounted for and don’t get you to anywhere near the 40 million mark.
Regardless how you cut the numbers up, 40 million is an order of magnitude too high and represents a symptom of underlying malfunction or shortcoming in the healthcare system.
There are enough studies that delve into why people are uninsured and what the baseline costs are for us to know that there is a problem and that 40 million is way way too high.
This isn’t something that “the left” as you call them has concocted, and has nothing to do with the party-political system.
It has to do with the cost of medical care vs the probability of needing care.
Whether you call that a “crisis” or a “problem” depends on what you think the norm should be, but pretty much nobody in the healthcare sector thinks that 40 million is where the pointer should come to rest.
The economists are also concerned because with that many uninsured we know that an awful lot of primary and preventative care is not occurring, and so conditions that were easily treatable at low cost turn into expensive conditions (some transmissible) and we lose people, productivity, and incur greater public costs than if the people had been covered.
If you think that economists are “left wing”, I suggest you think again.