Assurance-santé: depuis 19 mois un hôpital assume tous les frais pour un immigrant illégal

Pourquoi? Il n'au aucun endroit où aller... Le coût de ses soins est de 1,4 million... Il y a assurément un vide juridique sur cette question. Personne ne veut de ce patient sans assurances et sans papiers qui ne veut pas exposer sa famille, elle aussi sans papiers, à des représailles et/ou des coûts qu'elle ne pourra assumer. Pendant ce temps, l'hôpital perd des sommes astronomiques...

"Nineteen months later, Mr. Fok, 58, greeted a reporter from his bed in Room 516, eager to have a visitor. In the previous year and a half, perhaps 100 or more patients had come and gone from the room’s other bed, but Mr. Fok had gone nowhere. “Yes, I remember you,” he said. “John, right?”

The price of his treatment: $1.4 million.

And who was paying for it?

“The government,” Mr. Fok guessed, though he was not sure. “The hospital is losing money.”

In a city with a large immigrant population, it is not rare for hospitals to have one or more patients who, for reasons unrelated to their medical condition, do not seem to leave. At Downtown, where a bed costs the hospital more than $2,000 a day, there are currently three long-term patients who no longer need acute care but cannot be discharged because they have nowhere to go. The hospital pays nearly all costs for these patients’ treatment. One man left recently after a stay of more than five years.

They are the forgotten people in the health care system — uninsured, usually undocumented, without resources and stuck in the system’s most expensive course of care. Some are abandoned by or estranged from relatives; some belong in rehabilitation centers, where care is much cheaper, but because of their immigration status they are not enrolled in Medicaid or Medicare, so the places will not take them. For hospitals, some of these patients, like Mr. Fok, come in as medical cases and then quickly become puzzles for detective work.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/02/nyregion/stuck-in-bed-for-19-months-at-hospitals-expense.html?pagewanted=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha29