George Putnam
Saturday, April 2, 2005

Story Continues Below

  One such patriot is Dr. Madeleine Cosman, Ph.D., Esq. This outstanding medical lawyer has a forthcoming book, "Who Owns Your Body?" in which she tells us how the influx of illegal aliens has devastating hidden medical consequences. Recently she informed this reporter on illegals and EMTALA, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act.

EMTALA provides uninsured people with medical care in hospital emergency rooms. The coersive EMTALA obligates hospitals to treat the uninsured but does not pay for that care. EMTALA requires each emergency room to treat anyone who enters with an "emergency" associated with cough, headache, hangnail, cardiac arrest, permeated lumbar disc, drug addiction, alcohol overdose, gunshot injury, automobile trauma, HIV-positive infection, mental problem, or personality disorder. The definition of emergency is flexible and vague and includes almost any condition requiring mandatory care.

What is unseen is that many illegal aliens harbor within their bodies fatal diseases that long ago American medicine fought and vanquished. Now illegal aliens carry drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis, malaria, leprosy, plague, polio, dengue fever, and chagas disease (see Importing Disease).

Under EMTALA, you the taxpayer pays for it because, you see, EMTALA is an unfunded federal mandate. And the government imposes stiff fines and penalties up to $50,000 for each incident upon any physician, any hospital, refusing to treat any patient deemed to be an emergency case – even though the hospital or physician is not paid for treatment.

And don't forget the "anchor babies" (see 14th Amendment Abuse by Illegal Aliens and Anchor Babies), where an illegal woman in labor finds safe harbor. They pull their illegal alien parents and siblings into lucrative residency. The babies are instant citizens and qualify for welfare benefits.

Hospital emergency units under EMTALA have degenerated into local free medical offices. Here in California, between 1993 and 2003, 60 hospitals have closed because of more than 50 percent of unpaid services. Another 24 California hospitals closed in 2004. Even ambulances from Mexico come to emergency rooms with indigents because the drivers know that EMTALA requires accepting patients who come within 250 yards of a hospital.

Illegal aliens perpetrate much of our violent crime. "Dump-and-run patients" dropped on the hospital sidewalk or at the emergency room entrance, usually connected to drugs and gangs, require tracheotomies. Stab or gunshot wounds – EMTALA governs their treatment.

Our good friend Dr. Cosman describes all of this in her dissertation on illegal aliens and EMTALA – the devastating hidden medical consequences of this invasion. And yet the borders remain porous, open to human smuggling, and our government refuses to put a stop to it. As many as 10,000 illegal aliens cross our 2,000-mile porous border with Mexico daily – according to Time magazine, as many as 3 million annually.

Thank you, Dr. Madeleine Cosman, for helping to expose this dreadful violation of America's sovereignty.

Related articles cited in this article:
14th Amendment Abuse by Illegal Aliens
Importing Disease
Anchor Babies

Editor's note: