Well, not exactly. He does think it should be punishable by death. Commenting on concerns about illegal immigration and health care on the Right, Senator Jon Kyl says:
“In the last couple of bills … there were efforts to ensure that only eligible people would get the benefits … those efforts were defeated by Democrats,” Kyl argued, pointing out that hospitals currently are required to provide illegal aliens — as well as anyone else — with health care if they are in need.
“That illegal immigrants get care ... it's a big burden on hospitals,” Kyl said.
Well, it's actually not that undocumented immigrants get care that is so expensive. It's that they're disproportionately represented among the uninsured, so the only care they get is in the emergency room--which is makes the ultimate cost of treatment more expensive. Still, immigrants--undocumented and otherwise-- underconsume health care--they're 10% of the population, but consume only 8% of total health care services. But as far as undocumented immigrants are concerned, the Obama plan doesn't cover them anyway, so it's irrelevant--except in the sense that we're willingly taking on costs because we don't want to treat the undocumented, and in the short-term political benefits derived from relentless race-baiting over illegal immigration.
Beyond the numbers, I'm actually far more appalled by Kyl's suggestion that hospitals shouldn't treat illegal immigrants in the emergency room. The "pro-life" Kyl believes that if someone comes to an emergency room, and their life is in danger, hospitals should simply refuse to treat them. While entering the country illegally is a felony, many undocumented immigrants come here legally and stay beyond the time they have permission to be here, which is a civil violation. Neither should be a death sentence. But even if Kyl somehow proposed a method by which only undocumented immigrants were only treated if they were at death's door, it would still be immoral and inhumane.
-- A. Serwer
