House will vote on alien reporting

As part of the horse-trading to win votes for the prescription-drug bill, House Republican leaders promised to hold a vote on a bill requiring hospitals that treat illegal aliens to report them to federal authorities.

The Medicare overhaul bill, which passed the House on Saturday and the Senate on Tuesday, includes $1 billion to reimburse hospitals for treating indigent illegal immigrants.

But in exchange for supporting the bill, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, California Republican, extracted a promise from House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois to allow a vote on making hospitals report illegal aliens.

“I told leadership that if they wanted my vote they would have to mitigate the damage that is done by financing illegal immigrant health services. They needed my vote, so they took the deal,” Mr. Rohrabacher said in a statement.

He initially had voted against the $395 billion bill on Saturday morning, but he reversed himself during the three-hour delay that Republican leaders used to persuade several party members to switch their votes, saving the bill.

Federal law says hospitals cannot turn patients away, even if they are unable to pay and even if they are not U.S. citizens.

Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican and a member of the House-Senate committee that wrote the final compromise Medicare bill, included the money to reimburse hospitals, which spend an estimated $1.45 billion a year on uncompensated treatment for illegal immigrants.

“This puts many of them on the brink of bankruptcy or, at a minimum, [theyll have to] cut back on many of the services they provide us,” Mr. Kyl said. “Without this reimbursement, they are not going to be able to take care of us.”

A hospital in San Diego was forced to close after losing more than $5 million a year in unreimbursed medical care, much of it for illegal immigrants, and other hospitals have reported losing millions of dollars a year in uncompensated care.

Hospitals and health care associations have demanded that the federal government pay for what they see as an unfunded mandate for care.

The Medicare bill allocates $250 million a year from fiscal year 2005 through 2008 for reimbursement, to be divided among hospitals by a formula and rules to be worked out by the Bush administration.

California and Texas expect to get about $70 million a year and $50 million a year, respectively, and Arizona would receive from $40 million to $45 million, according to senators from those states.

But some members of Congress who support stricter immigration controls object to the funding, saying the money will just bolster the incentives for illegal aliens to continue to enter the United States.

“Writers of this Medicare bill have apparently never seen the movie ‘Field of Dreams’ — if you build an illegal alien entitlement program, they will come,” said Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican, who rallied fellow members to oppose the provision.

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