Color Me Unsurpised: Illegal Immigrants 50% Less Likely to Make Use of ERs

What you have heard about the abysmal toll that illegal immigrants take on emergency rooms around the country may not be true. In fact, a recent study by UCLA researchers shows that Latino illegal immigrants are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to make use of emergency rooms when injured or ill, even though hospitals, by law, must treat all E.R. patients regardless of whether they are insured:

Illegal immigrants from Mexico and other Latin American countries are 50% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to use hospital emergency rooms in California, according to a study published Monday in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
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“The current policy discourse that undocumented immigrants are a burden on the public because they overuse public resources is not borne out with data, for either primary care or emergency department care,” said Alexander N. Ortega, an associate professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health and the study’s lead author. “In fact, they seem to be underutilizing the system, given their health needs.”

Ira Mehlman, media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that lobbies for tougher immigration controls, said that usage rates are just one measure of illegal immigrants’ effect on healthcare. The other factor, he said, is the cost to taxpayers, which Ortega’s study did not examine.
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Ortega’s study is not the first to find that illegal immigrants use fewer healthcare services than people born in the U.S. But his study used the largest sample, analyzing data from 42,044 participants of the 2003 California Health Interview Survey, a randomized telephone survey conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the California Department of Public Health.

And while other studies have attributed lower usage to immigrants simply being younger and healthier than the overall population, the study published Monday took into account age, health status, insurance status and poverty level. All such factors being equal, it found, immigrants still made fewer visits to physicians and were 30% less likely than U.S.-born Latinos to have a regular source of healthcare.

Dr. Felix Nuñez, a Los Angeles-based family physician and former medical director of the South Central Family Health Center, said the findings confirm what he sees in clinics.

It is suspected that illegal immigrants are not as inclined to seek medical assistance out of fear of deportation.

It seems to me that many fears touted by the most vocal opponents of undocumented immigrants are unfounded. Or at the very least, hyped to create panic that powerful politicians know full well serves an ulterior motive.