According to Customs and Border Protection data, apprehensions of illegal aliens have nearly tripled since 2019. These illegal aliens are people who oftentimes have serious medical needs, but have little to no financial resources. Illegal immigration burdens state Medicaid programs and uses up charities at an unsustainable pace.

Illegal immigration adds billions of dollars in unpaid medical bills to a medical system that’s already falling apart

Every year, tens of thousands of illegal immigrants flood U.S. hospitals, looking for treatment for infectious diseases, chronic diseases and disabilities. In fact, American hospitals as a whole are losing multiple billions of dollars annually because of unpaid medical bills coming directly from illegal immigrants. These unpaid medical bills drive up the overall cost of healthcare – a cost that ultimately gets passed on to Americans, who can barely afford healthcare as it is.

According to a new report from the House Committee on Homeland Security, the United States spends $451 billion annually due to the invasion at the U.S. border. The report finds that a significant portion of these annual costs are due to unpaid healthcare for illegal immigrants.

Most illegal immigrants lack medical insurance and depend on hospital discounts, private charities and government welfare programs. State Medicaid programs are absorbing unanticipated costs that only drive up the cost of health insurance premiums and deductibles for Americans. For example, Denver Health served approximately 8,000 illegal immigrants in 2023. These illegals made roughly 20,000 visits to the city’s health system that year. If the illegals qualify for Medicaid, they are more prone to use the system more often for minor issues. This makes it harder for Americans to get appointments and contributes to longer wait times at hospitals. The American medical system and the welfare programs that accompany it were not designed to absorb the influx of people and the medical problems that they bring.

Sanctuary cities absorb tens of thousands of medical visits from illegals, leading to longer wait times and higher costs for Americans

The Congressional report found that total Medicaid costs for “emergency services for undocumented aliens” in fiscal year 2021 exceeded $7 billion.

Denver Health public information officer Dane Roper said the total bill for uncompensated healthcare costs in 2023 was $140 million. Uncompensated healthcare costs have rapidly increased in recent years across Denver’s healthcare system. In 2020, uncompensated costs totaled $60 million. Two years later, the figure doubled, rising to $120 million.

“The perspective we’ve been trying to emphasize all along is that providing healthcare services for an influx of new immigrants who are unable to pay for their care is adding additional strain to an already significant uncompensated care burden,” Mr. Roper said. It’s an issue that needs to be urgently addressed. He advocates for local, state and federal governments to get involved and address the needs of new illegal immigrant populations, before it is financially untenable to respond to anyone’s medical needs, whether they are legal citizens or not.

In California, lawmakers recently worsened the problem by approving free healthcare for all illegal immigrants within the state. The new law is projected to cost taxpayers up to $6 billion per year. Many illegal immigrants have several untreated health issues.

According to Dr. Robert Trenschel, CEO of the Yuma Regional Medical Center, which is situated on the Arizona-Mexico border, illegal immigrants often cost up to three times more than the average American to treat. “Some [illegal] migrants come with minor ailments, but many of them come in with significant disease,” Dr. Trenschel said during a congressional hearing last year.

“We’ve had migrant patients on dialysis, cardiac catheterization, and in need of heart surgery. Many are very sick,” he said. Some illegals spend up to 60 days or more in the ICU before they can be safely discharged. If the issue of illegal immigration is not solved at the source, then its humanitarian impacts will continue to inhibit access to healthcare and drive up the cost of medical care for Americans.

Sound off about this development on The Liberty Daily Substack.

Sources include:

• AMAC.us
• CBP.com
• Homeland.House.gov [PDF]
• TheEpochTimes.com

The HRC’s Healthcare Equality Index sways the practices of hospitals and health care facilities by scoring them on whether they are adopting “LGBTQ+ inclusive patient, visitation and employment policies,” the The Washington Free Beacon highlighted in a recent report.

“Over time and due to a decade of advancement in LGBTQ+ inclusion in daily life, health care facilities have worked harder than ever to increase their work to provide equitable care for the LGBTQ+ community,” the HRC boasts, “and now the [Healthcare Equality Index] survey reflects and promotes these efforts through its scoring criteria.”

The Healthcare Equality Index objectives make it clear that to be scored well, health care institutions must prove they are inclusive of LGBTQ patients, cultivating inclusive workplaces by promoting LGBTQ policies and benefits, and engaging publicly with the LGBTQ community.

Inclusivity in those contexts may mean allowing patients or employees to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity, rather than biological sex, or providing access to “gender-affirming care”—a phrase used by activists to mask the grisly realities of transitioning, including hormones, puberty blockers, and surgeries to remove or “create” breasts, remove or “create” a penis, facial feminization, and more.

Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., earned a perfect score from the Healthcare Equality Index in 2022, the Free Beacon reported. The index uses a 100-point scale and awards points for things like displaying LGBT symbols, using patients’ preferred pronouns, asking what someone’s preferred pronouns are, conducting LGBT training sessions approved by the HRC, and more.

The index also punishes hospitals that allow “discriminatory treatment that is in conflict with their non-discrimination policy” and requires hospitals to offer the same treatments to treat gender dysphoria as the hospital offers to treat other medical conditions. That means, as the Free Beacon noted, that if a hospital uses puberty blockers to treat early puberty, it also must allow their use for children who “identify” as transgender.

The HRC prominently features both Pfizer and PhRMA as funders: “The HEI was funded in part by generous grants from Pfizer Inc. and PhRMA,” its website says, referring to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a trade group representing companies in the pharmaceutical industry.

Pfizer did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal. In a statement, PhRMA spokesman Brian Newell said that PhRMA supports and works with “a wide variety of organizations to help promote affordable access to health care.”

“Our work with HRC has primarily focused on issues impacting patient access and affordability, including for those with HIV, cancer, and other deadly diseases,” Newell added. “We were not involved in the development or release of this specific project.”

PhRMA declined to answer further questions about possible conflicts of interest.

Asked why hospitals across the country would implement the diversity, equity, and inclusion recommendations, David Gortler, a former senior adviser to the Food and Drug Administration commissioner and current Ethics and Public Policy Center scholar, told The Daily Signal that “hospitals are no longer run by physicians following scientific evidence anymore; non-physician administrators outrank medical doctors in leadership hierarchy.”

“Hospitals are also too administrator heavy, affecting the practice of medicine,” he explained, noting that academia has the same problem. Gortler pointed to the surprisingly faculty-heavy student-teacher ratios at Yale and Harvard. Many of those people in academia and hospitals nowadays have irrelevant degrees, he suggested, and gain their positions through “H.R. departments, which are also fully saturated with leftists” that “keep hiring DEI people in order to force through unscientific policies.”

“It’s a very pernicious way of altering the practice of medicine,” he said. And the new generations of physicians coming into hospitals are “fully pre-indoctrinated by the aforementioned medical school administrators,” Gortler added.

“These are the next generation of pharmacists, physicians, and nurses, and they’re being taught to specifically ignore fundamentals of biology and data-driven findings,” he emphasized. “They’re not following what science is trying to tell us. That’s a really bad problem.”

Roger Severino, vice president of domestic policy at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal that Pfizer and PhRMA have turned to an “ideologically driven interest group to do the dirty work” because federal law prohibits them from “directly pushing their dangerous drugs on kids with gender confusion.” (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.)

“Pfizer and PhRMA are profiting off the broken lives of children who would have come to accept their bodies if only their natural development weren’t interrupted by their drugs,” Severino said. “Yet they continue to pay HRC to bully doctors and insurers into prescribing and paying for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones that are sold with a smile by Pfizer and PhRMA members. These companies have absolutely no shame.”

Jay Richards, director of the DeVos Center for Life, Religion, and Family at The Heritage Foundation, similarly told The Daily Signal that “it’s a self-evident conflict of interest for private industry groups and drug companies to fund activist organizations that push ideological ‘medicine’ that creates lifelong patients for the drug companies.”

“But what should we say when those same activist organizations create score cards to reward those same drug companies with good publicity?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s hard to imagine a clearer case of cynicism masquerading as virtue.”

Those familiar with the topic will notice the Healthcare Equality Index’s similarities to the Corporate Equality Index, another Human Rights Campaign initiative thought to be behind Bud Light’s financially disastrous decision to use a biological male who “identifies” as a transgender woman, Dylan Mulvaney, as its public face.

Bud Light’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch, formerly was honored with HRC’s “Best Place to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality” title. But HRC removed Anheuser-Busch from the list and suspended its Corporate Equality Index score over Bud Light’s response to public outrage over its promotion of Mulvaney, a biological man, as a woman.

“We don’t make this decision lightly,” Jay Brown, senior vice president of programs, research, and training at the HRC, told Business Insider, citing the growing number of Republican-led bills protecting children from irreversible sex-change surgeries, banning biological males from women’s private spaces, and prohibiting classroom discussions of sexual topics. The HRC opposes such legislation.

“This is about supporting the current and future workforce, as well as shareholders and consumers,” Brown added. “We’ve seen that when businesses center inclusion in both policy and practice, they come out on top, regardless of baseless, hateful attacks.”

HRC also revealed to Business Insider that it had pressured Anheuser-Busch in late April to release a statement supporting Mulvaney. That move came before the HRC’s subsequent punishment: stripping Anheuser-Busch of its score.

Even Fox News follows the directives of the HRC’s Corporate Equality Index, “the nation’s foremost benchmarking survey and report measuring corporate policies and practices related to LGBTQ+ workplace equality.” The Daily Signal reported this week that for the past several years, Fox has received a perfect score on the Corporate Equality Index, and a former Fox News employee also told The Daily Signal that the company frequently mentions its perfect score in employee-training materials.

According to Fox’s company handbook policies on gender transition, Fox News employees are allowed to use restrooms that align with their gender identity, permitted to dress in alignment with their preferred gender, and must also be addressed by their preferred name and pronouns in the workplace.

The HRC did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Daily Signal.

Article cross-posted from Daily Signal.

Daniel Watkins with Watkins & Letofsky and Michael Hamilton with Hamilton & Associates filed three complaints—one against Saint Agnes Medical Center, Community Regional Medical Center, and Clovis Community Medical Center—in the Superior Court of California in Fresno County on Sept. 7.

Both Clovis Community Medical Center and Saint Agnes Medical Center told The Epoch Times that they couldn’t comment on pending litigation, while Community Regional Medical Center didn’t immediately respond.

Watkins and Hamilton discussed the lawsuit the day of the filing at an event called, “Remdesivir Death: Landmark Lawsuit,” where they were joined by medical advocates such as Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Bryan Ardis, Dr. Angie Farella, and Dr. Janci Linsay, all of whom have spoken out against the use of remdesivir.

Watkins said they filed the lawsuits on the behalf of 14 Fresno-area families who allege that the hospitals engaged in medical deception and failed to provide informed consent in relating the potential side effects, such as kidney failure.

“Full informed consent means that patients must be provided with full information about the deadly harm that this dangerous experimental drug causes on its own,” the lawsuit states. “They must be told that the only time it was ever tested, it was pulled because it killed so many people.”

The lawsuit references a study found in the New England Journal of Medicine in which a safety board found it to be the least effective and deadliest drug in the trial before it was suspended after 53 percent of the Ebola patients who took the drug died.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has said it’s the only drug approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat COVID-19.

“Remdesivir received Emergency Use Authorization in or around May of 2020, after being recommended by an NIH panel that contained nine individuals with financial ties to its creator, Gilead Sciences,” the lawsuit alleges. “It is very nearly the equivalent of a death sentence for a COVID patient, or a patient with real Pneumonia (as opposed to ‘covid pneumonia’).

Without receiving informed consent before giving remdesivir, the hospitals violated the Nuremberg Code, the lawsuit states, which criminalizes human experimentation performed without informed consent.

In some cases, according to witness testimony, Watkins said in the conference that remdesivir was given even after the patients declined.

The Remdesivir Protocol

The lawsuit alleges that the patients were subjected to what it called “The Remdesivir Protocol,” which varies in each hospital.

“A patient comes to the hospital often for a problem unrelated to COVID-19,” the lawsuit says. “They are told they have COVID-19 or ‘COVID pneumonia.’”

From there, they are separated from loved ones and placed in a room where they are told remdesivir is the only option, the lawsuit says.

“They are placed on a BiPap machine at a high rate, making it difficult for them to breathe,” the lawsuit says. “Their hands are often tied down so they can’t take the BiPap machine off their face.”

In many cases, the lawsuit says a psychiatrist will determine the patient agitated, which results in the sedation of the patient, making it difficult for them to fight the side effects of remdesivir “especially as it relates to their ability to breathe against the side effects and against the BiPap machine.”

“Their phone and the signaling instrument for the nurse are typically placed beyond their reach,” the lawsuit alleges.

The patients are also kept malnourished, and eventually intubated, the lawsuit states, where the patient then dies.

“It takes a ‘protocol patient’ about nine days to die on average,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit goes on to address federal financial incentives the hospital gets for each step in the protocol.

Hamilton, who is also a legal strategist with the medical, constitutional, and spiritual rights organization Truth for Health Foundation spearheaded by Dr. Lee Vliet, discussed what he said was the financial reward system for the protocols in the conference.

“What I’m going to speak about is the average charge rate for three categories of COVID victims,” Hamilton said.

If a patient is treated and sent home, the average charge rate in California is $3,200, he said.

“If you bring them into the hospital and treat them as a non-complex COVID patient, the average charge rate is $111,000,” he said. “However, if you treat them as a complex COVID patient, which means you have to either intubate them, or put them in intensive care, by definition they become complex, and for that the average charge rate is roughly $450,000.”

On top of these charges, the hospitals get a bonus from the government by way of the International Classification of Diseases code that allows them to charge an extra 20 percent on the entire hospital stay, adding $90,000 to the $450,000.

“So, you can see why there’s a great incentive not to just give them something that works and send them home, but to actually bring them in, find a way to intubate them, call it a complex case, and get $500,000 instead of $3,200. That’s a tremendous financial incentive.”

Personal Autonomy

The four causes of action listed in the lawsuit are fraudulent concealment leading to wrongful death, violation of the Elder Abuse and Dependent Adult Civil Protection Act, medical negligence leading to wrongful death, and medical battery leading to wrongful death, all of which are related to the allegation that the hospitals failed to adequately treat the patients.

During the conference, Watkins said they filed the lawsuit “in hopes that it will spark the filing of many others because there are healthcare professionals and facilities across [nation] this doing this.”

“Fundamentally, personal autonomy in medical decisions is a right that we all have, and that’s the real issue here,” Watkins said.

Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.