An Arizona hospital has been forced to spend over $20 million on treating illegal immigrants who crossed the border, with nobody giving support.
Speaking to Rachel Campos-Duffy on Fox & Friends, Robert Transchel, the president and CEO of the company who runs Arizona’s Yuma Regional Medical Center, said that the hospital has been absolutely overwhelmed with the number of illegal immigrants who’ve crossed the US-Mexico border that they’ve had to treat.
“It’s been a long journey,” he said. “We’ve been at this for well over a year now. We tracked our uncompensated care for a period of over six months, and we calculated that we’ve provided over $20 million in uncompensated care to the migrants crossing the border.”
In December, Border Patrol reported a record 16,000 encounters with illegal immigrants coming over the border in 48 hours, with El Paso in Texas seeing the single biggest group crossing ever. Among the thousands of migrants, Border Patrol seized $97 million worth of narcotics, and arrested murderers, rapists, and gang members.
The full $20 million figure does not include a number of other costs that the Arizona hospital has to cover, such as flight costs and expenditure for increased staffing levels. The illegal immigrants are the only patients at the hospital who have received free care.
Transchel added that no level of government is helping the hospital to cover the costs, despite pleading repeatedly to Arizona and federal officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, to help them handle the treatment for the illegal immigrants.
“We just don’t have a payer source. Everybody is sympathetic, and everybody lends a listening ear, but nobody has a solution,” he said, adding that it’s simply not a “sustainable model to have these continued rising expenses without a revenue source to offset that.”
Transchel said that the hospital will be “fine” for now, but that most hospitals only operate on a “very thin margin” of profit. “If this continues, it’s going to build up, and it’s going to continue to be a problem,” he noted.
Last month, Joe Biden toured a migrant services center in El Paso, which provided transportation and gifts to the immigrants that cross the border, asking workers “if I could wave the wand, what should I do” to solve the crisis.
In a video in December, 45th President Donald Trump layed into Biden for his incomptency in handling the border crisis. “He has shredded our system, and he is destroying our country,”Trump said. “We’ve never seen anything like it. Our country is under invasion.”
This news and commentary by Jack Hadfield originally appeared on Valiant News.
