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New emergency care guidelines for hospitals treating immigrants

Physician Practice Advisor, August 10, 2004

Hospitals that want to keep federal funding for emergency care for uninsured patients will be forced to ask patients about their immigrant status, according to new Health & Human Services (HHS) guidelines, according to a report from the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The program will distribute $1 billion to U.S. hospitals over four years, and hospitals will be permitted to use the money to help any uninsured patient regardless of their immigrant status.  CMS reports that it will use information on immigrant status to develop statistics about the number of undocumented immigrants that receive medical treatment in the United States. A third of the money will be distributed to states with the largest number of undocumented immigrants, according to Kaiser.

Hospitals will have to ask uninsured patients whether they are:

• U.S. citizens
  
• lawful permanent residents
  
• aliens with valid, current employment authorization cards
  
• students, tourists, or business travelers with nonimmigrant visas 
  
• foreign citizens with 72-hour border-crossing cards

Hospital employees will have to sign forms certifying that the immigration status information is true and complete-employees who provide false information may face "civil and criminal penalties," Kaiser says. Hospitals and immigrant advocates are alarmed at the new requirements.

"It's likely that the undocumented immigrant parents will be terrified to seek care for their children, let alone themselves," said Marcela Urrutia, an analyst at the National Council of La Raza. "That could lead to serious public health problems, including the spread of communicable diseases."

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