Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants

Health Care for Undocumented Immigrants

Literature Review

In September 1993, then President Clinton addressed a joint session of Congress and the public in a televised speech about his proposed "universal" health care plan-"universal" except for the 3.2 million undocumented immigrants it excluded. The potential consequences of the plan included higher health care costs for these immigrants as well as reduced access to care related to the dismantling of key safety net programs that served them (Cohen , 2009).

In September 2009, President Obama similarly spoke to Congress and the public about his health care reform proposal, a proposal that would also exclude, among others, undocumented immigrants. It was in response to his emphatic statement that ". . . the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," that a U.S. Representative shouted his now-infamous, "You lie!" interjection ( King, 2007)[p.1]. Indeed, the Patient Protection and Affordability Care Act signed months later by President Obama does not cover the now near 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S (Mastroianni, 2009).

Also in the fall of 2009, high-profile media attention was given to the fates of the several dozen undocumented patients whose kidney dialysis was to end with a unit closure at Atlanta's Grady Memorial Hospital. Although the debate over health care reform was full-blown when this story appeared, the place of undocumented immigrants in health care reform never truly played a central role in it (Jordan, 2009).

This omission was hardly an oversight. Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, ensured the relative silence of politicians when he warned, "We're not going to cover undocumented workers, because that's too politically explosive."[p.17] When pressed on this, he reiterated, "That's very politically charged. And I don't want to take on something that's going to sidetrack us." (Faden, 2009: 14)

That said, some groups attempted to bring public and elected officials' attention to the consequences of the proposed reform bills for undocumented immigrants. Primarily religious, Latino/a groups, and health/health care organizations argued for the inclusion of these immigrants, while anti-immigration groups posed vocal opposition to any potential benefits for them. This paper begins with a brief descriptive overview of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. and their health care and insurance coverage. It highlights the most common moral, economic, and public health arguments made for and against the inclusion of undocumented immigrants in the 2010 health care reform (Stein, 2009). The paper then asserts that undocumented immigrants are part of the U.S. health care community and urges health care workers to become more active participants in this policy arena.

Demographic Characteristics of Undocumented Immigrants in the U.S., Including Health Care and Insurance Coverage Imprecision and inaccuracies abound in the discourse and in the data about immigrants in the U.S., so it should be noted that the focus here is on undocumented immigrants: foreign-born people who reside in the U.S. but are not legally-recognized residents. These people are sometimes also referred to as unauthorized immigrants, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, or people without authorized ...