Why Isn’t Mexico Asked To Take Care Of Its Own Citizens?

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has churned out a typical pro-illegal immigrant fluff piece that I thought was worth commenting on. It’s titled, “Immigrants’ safety net unravels — Elimination of state indigent fund puts many in jeopardy” and as per usual with these sort of articles, they’ve found a sob story to try to tug on your heartstrings so hard that you’ll abandon all rational thought…

“Aurelia Baltazar Loza slipped over the Mexican border into the United States with three of her children not long after her husband of 25 years was killed in a traffic accident.

At the time of his death, the mother of nine had never worked outside her home in a poor pueblo in Jalisco. Two years later, though, she was making $6 an hour packing fish in a cannery in South Bend — barely enough to keep her 9-year-old twins, Pedro and Nelida, and 14-year-old son, Alex, fed and to send money to a sister caring for the children she had to leave behind.

Then, unexpectedly, her son Pedro seemed to wilt like a cut flower left in the sun. His appetite disappeared. His body swelled. Loza said she assumed he had a nasty cold until the night in April when he began vomiting blood.

…(10 year old) Pedro’s doctor said he arrived close to death. He was in the extreme heart and kidney failure that accompanies end-stage renal disease. In the months since, he has been kept alive by kidney dialysis treatments and liquid nutrition pumped into his stomach while he sleeps.

…If Pedro had fallen ill just a year ago, the state would have paid for his transplant and the anti-rejection drugs needed afterward.

But faced with skyrocketing health-care costs and a budget hard-hit by the tenacious recession, the state Legislature has gutted what was once one of the nation’s more generous health care programs for undocumented children.

Last October, the state eliminated the full health care coverage it had been offering to poor undocumented immigrant children for 12 years. Then last spring, lawmakers eliminated the $111 million-a-biennium Medically Indigent Fund used to reimburse hospitals and doctors in charity care cases like Pedro’s.

Top brass at the state Department of Social and Health Services recommended the cut, not realizing until this summer that without it, the state could not pay for illegal immigrants’ chronic-care needs without violating federal law.

The federal Medicaid program covers only the “emergency medical conditions” of illegal immigrants. Because it is saving Pedro’s life, dialysis qualifies. A transplant does not, even though it could save Washington’s health care system $35,000 a year for decades to come.”

The article talks about saving, “Washington’s health care system $35,000 a year for decades to come” by giving Pedro a transplant. I have a better idea; why don’t we ship Pedro and his mother home and let Mexico worry about how to pay his medical bills? While I would be steadfastly opposed to denying anyone emergency care, I don’t think the taxpayers of the United States should be expected to pay for the long-term care of people who are not US citizens. Simply put, it’s Mexico’s responsibility to care for their citizens, not ours.

Americans should not be asked to provide long-term medical care, an education, and a safety net for someone just because their parent managed to evade the border patrol and sneak into our country. We spend untold billions of dollars every year treating illegal aliens like Pedro who should never have been here in the first place. If that were to stop, not only in Seattle, but in hospitals all across America, we wouldn’t have so many illegal aliens flooding into our country to begin with.

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