Sick Bastards

Today, The Star attempts to file a nuanced report on undocumented workers who fall sick and run up huge medical bills on the taxpayer's dime.

It's one of those personal stories about a guy who may have washed your dishes and now is down on his luck.

The 23-year-old restaurant worker is an undocumented immigrant originally from Guatemala. He barely remembers a car wreck in November that left him in a coma at North Kansas City Hospital.

He knows nothing about the estimated $250,000 the hospital has spent to keep him alive.

Sad for him, sad for taxpayers but still providing lots of ammo for anti-immigration critics.

And then there's this:

He's still unaware that the hospital, faced with the possibility of rapidly mounting bills, tried to fly him to his home country in a specially equipped plane while he was comatose.

Nice. But eerily similar to somebody trying to hide the body of a dead hooker after they are "finished."

Strangely, the poor guy's situation was remarkably similar to Terry Schiavo's ordeal, only without all of the religious conservatives defending his right to live:

According to court documents, doctors at North Kansas City diagnosed Sacaries-Barrios as comatose and suffering head injuries and a ruptured spleen. They placed him on a ventilator to assist his breathing and fed him through a tube.

When the hospital transferred Sacaries-Barrios to Alpine North on Dec. 23, his condition had stabilized, but he was in a persistent vegetative state, incapable of conscious thought or behavior.

I know, you're probably waiting for me to post an mp3 of a violin track. But wait, there is the typical insipid defense of undocumented workers:

The immigrants often work at low-paying jobs that do not provide health insurance. They often do not qualify for government health programs, such as Medicaid, or are too fearful to apply.

Christina Vasquez Case, director of Alianzas, a University of Missouri-Kansas City initiative that works with the Hispanic community, said she understood how unpaid medical bills could frustrate communities, but said the American labor market had a role in creating the situation.

Undocumented workers "get here, and within 36 hours of being here, the people who want to work, can work," Case said. "That is the reality of it."

When undocumented immigrants show up at emergency rooms in critical condition, hospitals are ethically and legally bound to treat them.

Thing is, after you get done reading how much medical care costs for undocumented workers the only logical conclusion you could come to is that "they" should be sent back to their own country for treatment. Cruel but logical, like Spock on a bad hair day.

But what this article doesn't say is that MOST MEDICAL CARE IS OVERPRICED AND INACCESSIBLE to the working poor (almost everybody) and undocumented workers alike. There are millions of uninsured people in this country who would be just as far up shit creek as this guy if they happened to get into a horrible car accident. Insurance companies and healthcare corporations have driven up the price of medical care to outrageous levels. And while kicking all the undocumented/illegal/whatever patients out of the country might provide some relief . . . the rising cost of treating the uninsured and undocumented is just a symptom of a terminally ill healthcare industry.

Sure, it probably isn't very moral or ethical to deny treatment to someone because they are undocumented . . . but that's a weak argument that relies on a sense of decency that people can't live up to when money is at stake. And like it or not, this country and all of its people and businesses are all about (only about) the bottom line. Remember that it's primarily financial greed that encourages immigrants to come to this country in order to provide cheap labor.

Increasingly, treating the sick has become a brutal business. And, time and again it has been demonstrated that the pursuit of profit shows no loyalty to notions of morality or respect for nationality. The healthcare industry gladly passes on their overblown expenses to the taxpayers and then scapegoats the uninsured, the undocumented and whoever else who dares to cut into their profit margins. If the healthcare and insurance industry continue to treat their balance sheets far better than their patients, in the end it will be the nation's health that pays the price.

Fortune cookie translation: Be careful when cutting throats, because you may slip and cut your own.