Okay! Case closed. Illegal immigrants who have no claim on benefits paid for by US taxpayers are repatrioted after medically stable, and delivered into the hands of a physician in their home country, where they presumably receive care they are entitled to as a citizen of a country they were born in.

I have zero problem with that. I have no itch to pay for the rehab and maintenance of critically ill illegal immigrants who snuck over our closed borders under cover of darkness without documentation, knowing they were doing wrong, feasting off the bounty of the American taxpayers. Sorry they're sick, but they can feast off their own country's buffet now. I presume the countries they came from have hospitals and taxes too.

Much ado about nothing.

I agree with all of our frustrations concerning undocumented/illegal immigrants, especially when it comes to the rising costs of medical care to legal citizens. The crack-down on illegal immigration is long overdue, perhaps it should be under the auspices of Homeland Security. (If it were, it might be better funded, and it would give Homeland Security a worthwhile job.)

To have hospital release coodinators forced into becoming immigration officers just doesn't seem to hack it for me, though. Yet, what are they supposed to do?

Both our immigration system and our medical system are flawed. Both systems have been under attack in the past and are major talking points for the up-coming election. If employers turn their backs on the need for employees to 'prove' their citizenship in order to hire 'cheap' labor, they aren't taking into consideration the true cost of that labor should one or more of those workers need emergency medical care or, for that matter, more than emergency care. And, Immigration is at much at fault when it listens to employers moaning about the cost of doing business without undocumented labor.

Plus, the lack of oversight of the medical system has apparently led to a new industry uncovered in California. Clinics and hospitals have alledgedly screwed Medicare out of millions by taking homeless people, subjecting them to unnecessecary tests and/or procedures and/or treatment, scamming Medicaid, then releasing them back onto the street.

However, the Martin Memorial, Florida, case is far from closed. As I said in an earlier post in this thread, sometimes the lawyers have to step in in order to bring legal problems to public attention.