Florida Phoenix
A March 1 deadline for the DeSantis administration to submit to the Legislature a report on the immigration status of hospital patients came and went without the report being delivered.
Neither the Senate nor the House had received the statutorily required report by the deadline, according to legislative aides. The report was mandated by a 2023 immigration law passed by the Legislature before Gov. Ron DeSantis’ failed presidential bid.
DeSantis’ Communications Director Bryan Griffin on Sunday attributed the missed deadline to not having all the hospital data on time.
The Agency for Health Care Administration (AHCA) did not respond this week to a request for the latest edition of the report. But former AHCA Secretary Jason Weida in January told members of the House Health Care Budget Subcommittee that the report, covering calendar year 2024, shows that hospitals provided roughly $572 million in health care to “illegal aliens.”
“We all look forward to hopefully addressing those issues in the very near future,” Weida, who is now DeSantis’ Chief of Staff, told the subcommittee on Jan. 15.
Unless the findings have changed, that would be about the same amount as in last year’s report.
The first edition of the annual report tracked hospital data from June 1, 2023, through Dec. 31, 2023, and 10 years of hospital audited financial data. It found that fewer than 1% of all Florida hospital admissions and emergency room visits involved patients who self-reported as not legally residing in the United States. AHCA estimated that hospitals provided more than $573 million in health care services to patients who were not in the country legally.
AHCA, though, 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.”
The report for 2023 also 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.”
AHCA subsequently posted a different iteration of the report on a public dashboard; that report didn’t include that information.
The Legislature appropriated an additional $577,000 to AHCA in the Fiscal Year 2024-25 budget for the staff and resources necessary for its data collection efforts for migrants and nursing homes.
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Christine Sexton and Jay Waagmeester reporting. Florida Phoenix is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Florida Phoenix maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Michael Moline for questions: [email protected].
