Americans Traveling to Mexico for Health Care

by Dave Bennion · 2009-06-12 09:00:00 UTC
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Check out Tim Foley's great post on medical tourism--people leaving the U.S. to get needed medical care:

where you travel to care has a lot to do with your situation. If I were a king or a celebrity looking for an expensive and dangerous medical intervention, yes, I’d come to the United States. Money would be no object. If I’m struggling to make $35,000 a year, have no health benefits, and need that exact same expensive and dangerous medical intervention, I’d want to be in any industrialized nation other than the U.S. There, I’d be treated. Here, I wouldn’t just be sick; I’d be ruined.

Tim links to an interesting study of California residents traveling to Mexico for health care. "Everybody knows" that undocumented immigrants are responsible for California's budget crisis, largely because they clog emergency waiting rooms and use up valuable public services.

Except that they don't.

"What the research shows is that many Californians, especially Mexican immigrants, go to Mexico for health services," said lead author Steven P. Wallace, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, which conducts CHIS. "We already know that immigrants use less health care overall than people born in the U.S. Heading south of the border further reduces the demand on U.S. facilities."

Cost and lack of insurance were primary reasons both Mexican and non-Mexican U.S. residents sought health services across the border.

The one concern I would raise is that the study is based on info from 2001, but it has become much more difficult to cross the border without inspection since then. However, our health care system is at least as dysfunctional as it was then because George Bush basically ignored the problem for all eight years of his presidency.

Even Governor Schwarzenegger acknowledges that immigrants are needlessly scapegoated on budget issues (via Shadow).  But try telling that to some of California's rabid restrictionists like Lupe Moreno, who hates teh Gay at least as much as she despises immigrants.

Dave Bennion
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