Study: Emergency health care for North Carolina's illegal immigrants is costly

Pregnant, illegal Hispanic immigrants make up the overwhelming majority of patients seeking emergency health aid for poor immigrants, according to a study of one U.S. state facing a dramatic increase in its immigrant population.

But the cost of treating the emergency health care needs of recent and illegal immigrants still makes up less than 1 percent of the overall spending in North Carolina each year on Medicaid, according to the study that appears in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Association. Medicaid is a joint state-federal program that gives health care coverage to the poor and disabled.

Immigration, especially illegal immigration, remains a highly sensitive subject in the United States, and the study gives some context to one popular criticism that illegal immigrants are a costly drain on the U.S. health system.

The study also suggests that paying for basic checkups and pregnancy care for illegal immigrants would save states money.

U.S. law generally excludes illegal immigrants and legal immigrants who have been in the U.S. less than five years from Medicaid. But the law also allows Medicaid to pay for emergency medical care needed by some immigrants, including those who are pregnant or disabled.

The study found that 99 percent of the 48,391 people who received emergency Medicaid in North Carolina over the four-year period were illegal immigrants, 95 percent were female and 93 percent were Hispanic.

More than 80 percent received care related to childbirth and complications of pregnancy. Spending on care for pregnant women increased 22 percent between 2001 and 2004.

"I hope that it helps us think about whether there are better ways to allocate health care services to this population that has such limited access to primary care," said Dr. Annette DuBard, a researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and lead author of the study.

Emergency Medicaid spending also increased 70 percent for families with dependent children, 82 percent for disabled patients and 98 percent for elderly patients. Those figures suggest immigrants have come to North Carolina to stay, said Dr. E. Richard Brown, director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

The study said an estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants lived in North Carolina in 2004.

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Journal of the American Medical Association: http://jama.ama-assn.org