American Hospitals Deporting Sick Immigrants to Eternity

According to a New York Times story by Deborah Sontag datelined August 3, eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Florida, suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken local. Martin Memorial community hospital saved his life, twice. After failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, it kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million. So far so good. Thank you, Martin Memorial.

What happened next is quite shocking. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and "forcibly returned" Mr Jiminez to his home country Guatemala.

He was reportedly hoisted in his wheelchair up a steep slope to his remote home, coping with a severe traumatic brain injury in the absence of medical care or medicines - just Alka Seltzer and prayer, his 72-year-old mother said. Over the last year, his condition has deteriorated with frequent violent seizures, convulsions, vomiting of blood and unconsciousness.

The New York Times reports that many American hospitals are deporting seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to admit them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a serious problem for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

American immigration authorities are not involved in these private repatriations. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician's care in their homeland. But the hospitals are doing what they please, without governmental control, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.

These heartless repatriations are carried out by ambulances taking patients in the wrong direction, away from first-world hospitals to less-adequate care, if any.

"Repatriation is pretty much a death sentence in some of these cases," said Dr. Steven Larson, an expert on migrant health and an emergency room physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. "I've seen patients bundled onto the plane and out of the country, and once that person is out of sight, he's out of mind."

In fact, for the poor patient, it is often a journey to eternity.