Obamacare, Illegal Aliens Pushing New York To Bankruptcy

by Daniel Greenfield: Undocumented illegal aliens are having a documented effect on New York City's finances.

New York's flailing left-wing mayor is proposing $2 billion for the city's hospitals as part of an $82 billion budget. A budget that the city can't afford. What's driving the costs? Illegal aliens and ObamaCare.Closer to home, de Blasio said the growth in tax revenue that has swelled city coffers is starting to slow — with projected growth of 3.6% in 2016 and 1.9% in 2017, compared to an average of 7% in the last five years.

The executive budget would bring city spending on Health and Hospitals to $2 billion, up by $700 million since the mayor took office.

Health and Hospitals, which runs 11 hospitals around the city, has been reeling from financial troubles that officials say threaten its survival, necessitating last-minute injections of cash to keep it afloat.

The trouble comes in part because Obamacare included funding cuts assuming more people would have insurance, but the public hospitals still have to care for large numbers of undocumented immigrants who aren't eligible.New York has 375,000 illegals and they tend to use public hospitals.

To make things even tougher for Health + Hospitals, New York has a staggering 375,000 undocumented non-citizens who lack health insurance, according to the Mayor's Task Force on Immigrant Health Care Access. Under the federal Affordable Care Act, they are specifically barred from getting government-subsidized private health insurance — so they end up using public hospital facilities for even routine health needs, putting more strain on the system.

"They're our fellow New Yorkers. We believe in supporting them," de Blasio said at his budget briefing of the undocumented who don't have insurance. That's in keeping with the liberal New York assumption that any and all city services, no matter the cost, should be provided to undocumented immigrants.

A 2014 report by the Citizens Budget Commission flagged the problem with having so many people use hospitals for normal health needs, noting that nearly a quarter of admissions to H+H facilities are "preventable" — not medically necessary.

It's an expensive proposition. Another budget-buster is the administration's position, announced in its new report on H+H, that "unlike what has happened in other cities, Health & Hospitals will remain a vibrant public system — it is not for sale and the city will not abandon it."Until it does. New York City hospitals are frantically consolidating or being sold off due to ObamaCare. Catholic acute care hospitals in New York City vanished in a puff of smoke. Which puts yet more strain on city hospitals. On top of that, city hospitals are basically giant urgent care clinics for illegal aliens. Which no one wants to pay for.

And New York isn't alone in this boat. California is trying to get ObamaCare for illegal aliens.

In a potentially precedent-setting maneuver, legislators are attempting to clear the way for undocumented immigrants to buy health insurance through Covered California, the state's Obamacare exchange.The math remains quite simple and quite impossible.
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Daniel Greenfield is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. David Horowitz is a Contributing Author of the ARRA News Service

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