Reply #102: Maybe I am funny. [View All]

[hunter]

But the way it is now, undocumented aliens who show up in the E.R. for serious and expensive conditions, say for example metastatic breast cancer, get at best palliative care. Mostly they go home and die without making a lot of trouble because they don't want to put their undocumented relatives at risk of deportation.

You don't see patients like Elizabeth Edwards in the population of undocumented workers. They are already dead.

Health care rationing is a very real thing in the United States -- we simply don't talk about it, or we rationalize it as something else.

Basic healthcare, the kind of community healthcare that keeps us all safe from communicable diseases and spares us from encountering decaying beggars on every street corner, is relatively inexpensive. A wealthy nation like the United States can afford that kind of healthcare without any sort of immigration status check at the clinic door.