Denial of care would be harmful to U.S.

By ILENE DURST

SAN DIEGO — The current brouhaha over the slim possibility that an undocumented person might benefit from a national health insurance system ignores the reality that access to health care benefits society as a whole.

Barring immigrants, irrespective of their status, from purchasing health insurance through whatever plan Congress legislates only endangers the health and the economy of the entire United States.

As recognized by numerous international treaties and accords, and any number of sovereign states, access to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health is a basic human right.

Good health is essential to a person’s ability to participate in his or her community. A community’s failure to provide adequate preventive or curative medical care poisons its workplaces, schools and the social fabric of daily life.

In short, a successful society demands the good health of its citizens. As has been said in many forums by many others, the undocumented come to the United States to work — not to cash in on public benefit windfalls.

Although one may not condone the worker’s flouting of the immigration laws, one cannot ignore the presence of 13 million undocumented people in the United States, most of whom are gainfully employed.

If they possess the means to purchase health insurance under the new system, encouraging their participation best serves the country’s physical, mental and economic well-being.

Epidemiological studies prove that communities under stress — whether because of poverty or violence — experience higher incidences of disease, including diabetes, hypertension and heart disease.

If stress can so seriously undermine a community’s health, imagine the vulnerability of the undocumented to such disease. They fear deportation to countries where they cannot earn enough for a subsistence life, where they may be separated from parents, spouses or children, and where the government may be tyrannical or punitive. Instead, they submit to exploitation by employers and landlords, without legal recourse to defend their rights, always vigilant for the presence of the police or the Border Patrol.

Preventing these people from buying health insurance may be the surest avenue to creating a permanent unhealthy underclass with even more serious public health crises than the United States now faces.

Verification procedures

Nor do the statistics support the efficacy of so-called verification procedures used in other public health benefit programs to ensure that only U.S. citizens and long-term permanent residents receive government largesse.

A 2007 congressional study of procedures used by six states to verify citizenship eligibility for Medicaid discovered that the six states spent $8.3 million to verify applicants’ immigration status, only to apprehend eight undocumented people trying to game the system. How many physicals could have been purchased with that money?

Our immigration laws prohibit the entry of any person with a contagious disease, or a physical or mental disorder that may pose a threat to others, and deny residence to those who have not received vaccinations against vaccine-preventable diseases.

To deny access to medical care to prevent or treat such diseases for those present in the United States is dangerous folly. The H1N1 virus doesn’t stop to check insurance cards — certainly it will not be checking visas either.

X Ilene Durst is an associate professor of law at San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.