U.S. Border Control

New Jersey hospitals inundated by illegal aliens

January 9, 2005

You might expect it in California, or Arizona, Texas or Florida, but New Jersey’s hospitals will losed $200 million this year through providing care for illegal aliens. The New Jersey Hospital Association (NJHA) says the burden will only increase until state or federal agencies step in and pay the bills.New Jersey hospital administrators say that the cost of treating illegal immigrants has caused delays in purchasing life-saving technology or the adding valuable staff.

New Jersey hospitals expect to be reimbursed a total of $5.7 million a year - about 3 percent of the costs they'll incur - during that period by the federal government.

The senior vice president for health economics at the NJHA says that 40 percent of the hospitals in the state expect to lose money. "For some hospitals, the money they spend on uncompensated care for undocumented immigrants may force them to delay a big service or economize on existing care."

The federal government officially estimates that 135,000 illegal immigrants live in New Jersey. Seton Hall University’s Institute on Work believes the number may actually exceed 500,000.

Given the uncertainty about how many immigrants live in the country illegally, no one can say exactly how much they cost the nation's hospitals.However, given that New Jersey's illegal aliens cost hospitals an estimated $200 million, the many millions of illegal aliens across the nation surely cost several billion dollars per year.

The hospitals in just one city, Los Angeles, report that they lose $350 million a year on illegal immigrants.The federal government bears primary responsibility for enforcing the nation's immigration laws, but it never agreed to foot the bill for those who escape its grasp.To compensate for the multibillion-dollar costs that illegal aliens impose upon the nation's hospitals, for example, the federal government is planning to spend just $200 million a year, nationwide, for the next four years.

To qualify for payments from the state, hospitals must convince their patients to give extensive information about themselves and their finances. Many illegal immigrants, for obvious reasons, decline to provide such information. Many others provide false information.

Princeton HealthCare System, which runs the University Medical Center at Princeton, provided a glimpse into how hospitals care for patients who live here illegally.Patients who visit either the Princeton HealthCare clinic or the hospital emergency room must provide basic information, such as their name and address and some proof of residence. That information helps Princeton HealthCare figure out whether the patient qualifies either for Medicaid or for state charity care.Medicaid refuses to pay for illegal aliens.

New Jersey's hospitals have little hope, beyond government payments, for the number of illegal aliens who may need their care, even as that number grows by the hour.

In California, which has far more illegal aliens than New Jersey, the state medical association reports the cost of caring for illegal immigrants has helped force 60 emergency rooms to close during the past decade.Those closures, in turn, have led to crowding at many of the others. In big cities from Sacramento to San Diego, patients with minor injuries often must wait hours for care.The situation will likely get worse in the next few years.The rate of closures is on the rise, according to reports from the California Medical Association, and considering that some 80 percent of the state's emergency rooms report that they now lose money, largely because of the care they give away to illegal immigrants, hundreds more emergency rooms may be at risk.In Arizona, along the Mexican border, dozens of hospitals have cut back on services to cover the money they lose by providing free care to illegal immigrants. Administrators from one facility, the Southeast Arizona Medical Center, told local and national publications that the costs of caring for aliens drove them out of business.