{"id":8703,"date":"2009-09-14T09:55:19","date_gmt":"2009-09-14T16:55:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8703"},"modified":"2009-09-14T09:55:19","modified_gmt":"2009-09-14T16:55:19","slug":"health-care-reform-wont-include-undocumented-immigrants-but-it-should","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=8703","title":{"rendered":"Health Care Reform Won't Include Undocumented Immigrants. But It Should."},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Romano at Newsweek<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense\u2014and not just for them, but for everyone.<\/p>\n

Consider a few statistics. According to a July article in the American Journal of Public Health<\/em>, immigrants typically arrive in America during their prime working years and tend to be younger and healthier than the rest of the U.S. population. As a result, health-care expenditures for the average immigrant are 55 percent lower than for a native-born American citizen with similar characteristics. With the ratio of seniors to workers projected to increase by 67 percent between 2010 and 2030, it stands to reason that including the relatively healthy, relatively employable and largely uninsured illegal population in some sort of universal health-care system would be a boon rather than a burden. “Insurance in principle has to cover the average medical cost of all the people it’s serving,” explains Leighton Ku, a professor of health policy at George Washington University. “So if you add cheaper people to the pool, like immigrants, you reduce the average cost.” More undocumented workers, in other words, means lower premiums for everyone.<\/p>\n

The actuarial advantages don’t end there. As it is now, undocumented workers (and others) who can’t pay their way receive free emergency and charitable care\u2014a service that costs those of us with health insurance an additional $1,000 per year, as Obama noted. But if illegals were covered, this hidden tax would decrease, further lowering our premiums and “relieving some of the financial burden on state and local governments,” says Harold Pollack, a University of Chicago professor who specializes in poverty and public health. What’s more, employers currently have a clear economic incentive to hire undocumented immigrants: they don’t require coverage. A plan that mandates insurance for native workers but not their illegal counterparts actually makes life harder on the blue-collar Americans competing for jobs (and railing against immigrants) because it means that hiring them will cost more than hiring a recent transplant from Mexico City. As The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently explained, “If you’re really worried about the native-born workforce, what you want to do is minimize the differences in labor costs between different types of workers. A health care policy that enlarges those differences\u2014that makes documented workers more expensive compared to undocumented workers\u2014is actually worse for the documented workers.”<\/p>\n

At this point, you’re probably wondering whether taxpayers would have to foot a bigger bill for these newly insured illegals. Not necessarily\u2014at least in theory. As Obama said in Wednesday’s speech, “Like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects” to fund whatever care it provides. Given that many undocumented workers leave the country before they’re old enough to require much medical care, says Phillip Longman of the New America Foundation, “you could set up the system in a way that that they wind up contributing as much or more than they receive” in low-income subsidies, especially when the “offsetting savings of lower emergency-room use” are factored in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Romano notes, coverage of undocumented immigrants is politically impossible, even though it makes sense. (Via Ezra<\/a>.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew Romano at Newsweek: From a purely economic standpoint, insuring illegal immigrants makes a lot of sense\u2014and not just for them, but for everyone. Consider a few statistics. According to a July article in the American Journal of Public Health, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-care-and-related-issues","category-immigration-migrant-rights-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}