Christine Jordan Sexton
The first official report after Florida’s sweeping immigration measures were put in place a year ago shows that less than 1% of all Florida hospital admissions and emergency room visits were from patients who self-reported as not legally residing in the United States.
But that report also points out that many people would not answer the question.
The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) — relying on information given to the agency by health care providers — looked at admission dates over the last six months of 2023 when compiling the data, as well as 10 years of hospital audited financial data.
The report estimates that hospitals provided more than $573 million in health care services to patients who were not in the country legally. But AHCA was unable to determine how much of that care provided to migrants was uncompensated or find “any obvious correlation between the level of uncompensated care and the level of illegal aliens presenting at the hospital.”
And the report stated that “high levels of uncompensated care are more associated with rural county status than illegal immigration percentages. There also did not appear to be a correlation between total profitability and illegal immigration percentages. All the counties that had negative profit margins had below average illegal immigration ratios.”
The report was required under a law designed to clamp down on illegal immigration in Florida. The 2023 law, passed as Gov Ron DeSantis prepared to announce his bid for President, hiked penalties on those aiding migrants to enter the state or employing migrants. Immigration groups, such as The Florida Immigration Coalition, say the law has had a chilling impact on people seeking emergency care, especially pregnant women.
The law also required hospitals that receive Medicaid dollars to collect information as to whether the patient is a U.S. citizen, lawfully present in the U.S., or not lawfully present in the U.S. Patients are not required to answer the question, but hospitals are required to ask it and to report the data to AHCA quarterly.
The report shows that of the 1,720,554 total hospital admissions between June 1 and Dec. 31, 4,022 (0.81%) admitted patients reported not being legal residents. Another 132,972 (7.73%) refused to answer the question.
Data was similar for emergency room visits. Of the 4,787,629 patients there, 39,758 (0.83%) reported not legally residing in the country and another 349,199 (7.29%) refused to answer the question.
AHCA notes in the report that of those who refused to answer the question, “Some portion of those responses contain respondents who were in the country illegally.”
The report infers, though, that the percentage of people refusing to answer the question could be inflated. Hospitals may have used the refuse to answer category when the data collection was missing or if the patient was unable to respond due to their medical condition.
Florida Immigration Coalition Communications Director Adriana Rivera said she is pleased with the percentage of patients who didn’t answer the question. “We want to encourage everyone to decline to answer this invasive and sensitive question. Let’s be clear, the state is not really worried about counting nickels and dimes; they’re using this as a scare tactic to run our friends and neighbors who are immigrants away from the state,” Rivera told Florida Politics Tuesday.
Most hospitals have complied with the reporting requirements. Two hospitals didn’t report their Q3 data to the state and the Q4 data is missing 20 hospitals. The missing data, though, isn’t expected to “materially change the percentage of illegal admits or declined to answer ratios.”
The Legislature agreed during the 2024 Session to give AHCA an additional $577,000 so the agency can hire four people to help better gather the immigration status data, as well as nursing home audited financial data.
Senate President Kathleen Passidomo told reporters Tuesday she wasn’t sure that the 2023 law had a reduction on the number of people seeking care.
“I don’t know what the evidence is, I haven’t seen it,” Passidomo said.
Annual Hospital Immigration Data Report 2023-7 by janelle on Scribd
