Having finally realizedtheir exceedingly precarious situation, it appears that many ofCalifornia's counties have finally decided to reject unfunded, unjustified mandates,even if it tugs at a few of the administrators' heartstrings.
Fresh onthe heels of the state's petition for more federal aid to help inkeeping track of undocumented repeat offenders, a number of Californiacounties now have decided that rather than reserving their anger forthe criminally active undocumented worker population (who are in the hands of thestate government), they will instead take little steps towardsbudgetary wisdom in their own communities. The Los Angeles Times reports that: "Forced to slash their budgets, some California counties are eliminatingnonemergency health services for illegal immigrants."
Thismove marks something of a step toward sanity by California'sgovernmental officials, who have recently seemed to be going through apolitical five stages of grief, with a fixation on the "denial" phase.Needless to say, a large number of dubiously practical ideas wereadvanced during this phase,most of which further alienated confidence in the government, and soit's nice to see that officials are finally beginning to accept that afew pet projects will have to fall by the wayside.
Thisone in particular seems common-sensical from a moral perspective -after all, as anti-illegal immigration activist Barbara Coe put it,these people "have absolutely no right, No. 1, to be here and, No. 2,to take the tax dollars of law-abiding American taxpayers foranything." In fact, one could make the argument (as Ms. Coe probablydoes) that if her group's own pet project, Proposition 187 (which wassupposed to bar the state from providing public services to illegalimmigrants) hadn't been stalled in court, a lot of the budget crisiswouldn't exist. Such logic is certainly convincing.
Still, there are objections which deserve to be considered, if onlyfor the sake of refuting them. The first - and the one cited by the Timesmost prominently - is that "this will only shift the burden to hospitalemergency rooms." Or, to put it more generally, this will actuallyresult in a higher net consumption of California taxpayer dollarspaying for illegal immigrants, one way or another. However, thisargument (especially where the emergency room is concerned) can beeasily mitigated in its danger. For instance, according to DavidHayes-Bautista of the UCLA Center for the Study of Latino Health andCulture, "study after study shows that illegal immigrants are lesslikely thanU.S.-born residents to go to the doctor or seek regular medical care."
Bautistaintended the above quotation to be an injunction against this measureor, to use his words, to prove that "We are mortgaging the future toscrape through the present." That rhetorical accusation will beaddressed in a moment, but his comment on studies about illegalimmigrant healthcare consumption is actually a bit of a non sequitur atbest and counterproductive to his case at worst. If illegal immigrantsare less likely to go to the doctor, then depending on how much lesslikely they are, this may reduce the amount of immigrants who actuallybother to seek medical care in the emergency room, which may offsetcosts, especially if the immigrants are aware of the high costs ofmedication. Moreover, if Bautista's argument is that illegal immigrantswill be more likely to allow their conditions to worsen because ofirregular visits, one has to ask what makes the emergency roomdifferent, other than the fact that it is accessible via a 911 call. Thebarriers to medical knowledge surrounding emergency rooms arerelatively similar to the barriers to medical knowledge generally, andunless illegal immigrants are exceedingly well-informed about the legalfine points of the medical industry (an unlikely scenario), they areunlikely to perceive a difference.
But of course, for Bautista, the studies and data are ancillary toa larger point - that the problem of illegal immigrant health carewon't just go away, and that by sacrificing it in order to balancebudgets this year, we may be exacerbating the problem. This objectionis persuasive to a degree, but can be answered in several ways. In thefirst place, debating the fine points of long term policy is a luxurywhich California's counties no longer have in the same sense thatconsidering the value of one's wallet is no longer an option when oneis being mugged. If we don't "mortgage the future" right now, theremight not be one for California's infrastructure, this argument wouldrun.
But moreover, Californians have already "mortgaged the future."They have mortgaged it multiple times, in fact. some of them spurred onby the expenses which illegal immigrants bring to the state - about $10.5 billion,all told. Throwing out illegal immigrant health care is not "mortgagingthe future." In fact, to use the mortgage metaphor, it's more likecleaning squatters out of one's already triple-mortgaged house. Ofcourse, if the border were secure in any meaningful sense, we might beable to get rid of some of the costs permanently, but that's a concernfor after we've paid off our triple mortgages on the future.
That is,assuming the state hasn't bought the farm.