Down goes another GOP talking point

[VABills]

Have you bothered to read any of the rest of the thread, man?  The study dealt with primarily hispanics.  Chef Jim and GG are arguing about hispanics.  And the entire debate about undocumented workers in this country is centered around hispanics.  I've mentioned numerous times in many other threads that deporting all undocumented workers in this country would mean a whole helluva lot of other ethnic groups would go as well, and got roundly ignored.  But score one for you for adding "clarity" to this thread. 

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Other then you, noone mentioned hispanics. Everyone said illegals. But again you !@#$ing assume. Hispanics are not the only illegals in this country.

[GG]

Once again you don't live here.  I have for nearly a quarter of a century.  I was in the middle of one of the industries most involved in hiring illegals so I know, I've seen it, I've lived it.  I've seen their positive impact AND their negative impact.  It is my opinion (yes opinion) that the negative greatly outweighs the positive.  Also I don't think there would be a net outflow of people.  Maybe the over spending and over taxation by the government can be attributed to the large number if illegal inflows which has chased business out of CA in droves.

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It's not like NYC doesn't have any illegals.

 

The influx of illegals over the last decade is directly related to the economic growth and the need for low wage workers to do low skilled jobs. It's hard to predict doom & gloom for the future of this immigration trend, when every previous immigration boom has turned out very positive for the US.

 

Which is the symptom and which is the disease?

 

If the issue is undocumented aliens, why not make it easier to document and tax them? If history is any guide, you are certainly not going to stop them.

[GG]

Other then you, noone mentioned hispanics.  Everyone said illegals.  But again you !@#$ing assume.  Hispanics are not the only illegals in this country.

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Well, I was talking about brownish people. I guess I could have been referring to the terrorists who would run our ports.

[Chef Jim]

It's not like NYC doesn't have any illegals. 

 

The influx of illegals over the last decade is directly related to the economic growth and the need for low wage workers to do low skilled jobs.  It's hard to predict doom & gloom for the future of this immigration trend, when every previous immigration boom has turned out very positive for the US.

 

Which is the symptom and which is the disease? 

 

If the issue is undocumented aliens, why not make it easier to document and tax them?  If history is any guide, you are certainly not going to stop them.

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It's not like NYC doesn't have any illegals. 

 

Not like CA. CA leads the country, by far, in illegal immigration.

 

If the issue is undocumented aliens

 

This in not the issue. The issue, with me, is the number of illegal immigrants that are not working and living off the system. We can't employ them all.

 

If history is any guide, you are certainly not going to stop them

 

I don't think history has tried. So why start now? Is that it?

[VABills]

Well, I was talking about brownish people.  I guess I could have been referring to the terrorists who would run our ports.

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You mentioned Mexico, but again they are not the only illegals. In fact, in DC they say the largest group is from El Salvador, and the second largest was from Ethiopia I believe.

 

So again, not all are hispancis.

[Orton's Arm]

One of the big issues that those against "illegals" have is that they believe they are a drain on the system, and that they're sucking up tax dollars for free health care.  From RedState.com: Ca Prop 86; Subsidizing Illegal Aliens!.

Well, a new Rand study shows that it's just not the case.

Illegal aliens use little healthcare

Eleven dollars!?!  Round' em all up!

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It would have cost $12.95 to read what's likely a piece of Leftist propaganda, which isn't going to happen. I get the feeling nobody else on this thread cared to be ripped off in that particular way either.

 

But without having read the study, I can tell you there are various ways to calculate cost; in order to prove a point you're trying to make. For example, let's say you wanted to show a low cost number for being a passenger on an airplane. You'd look at the marginal cost of the extra jet fuel required for one extra passenger. If you wanted to show a high cost, you'd start allocating overhead costs, such as a portion of the pilot's salary, costs associated with leasing and maintaining the airplane, airport service fees, stuff like that. Under the first method, you could get a cost of a few dollars. Under the second, you could get a cost in the hundreds.

 

Suppose an illegal alien receives services from a hospital, and suppose the hospital doesn't get paid for providing those services. I suspect the study was set up in such a way that whatever costs the hospital may have incurred were ignored. It was probably assumed that none of these costs were passed onto the government in some other form.

 

If an illegal alien walked into a hospital, received a service, walked out, and the government didn't pay anything for this, you could argue that there was no cost. But if a million illegal aliens walk into hospitals, receive services, and walk out, there is a cost to everyone else involved. The hospitals need to get paid from someone for all the extra doctors and nurses and equipment and building space they're using to treat those illegal aliens. The extra money may come from higher HMO premiums, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, or from other sources, but it has to come from somewhere.

[GG]

But without having read the study, I can tell you there are various ways to calculate cost; in order to prove a point you're trying to make. For example, let's say you wanted to show a low cost number for being a passenger on an airplane.

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I beg you please don't continue, as you're starting to show the same acumen in economics as you do in statistics.

[Bungee Jumper]

It would have cost $12.95 to read what's likely a piece of Leftist propaganda, which isn't going to happen.

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It's published in a peer reviewed journal, you !@#$ing jackass!

[mike1011]

Your post is full of stats and numbers you've made up, and you call me a buffoon?  If the total cost to the taxpayers is $11 each, how does their burden jump to $250 each if the total cost increases by less than half (which you pulled out of your ass, anyway)?  The easy answer, of course, is that you are a fool.

 

Nope, I'm right. You just read articles and just predicate it's correct you are the fool. You are a complete idiot if you think otherwise. Look at the words themselves.

 

Let's look at the stats: $1.1 billion for people between ages of 18-64. Why did it conspicuously leave out the people who need money the most and get it the most because they are US citizens? Don't come touting stats with people who are their healthiest who don't need hospitals as much as those other age demographics. A very selective study. Of course we cannot study the words, that would be dangerous.

Additionally, as the sample was taken from around LA, a region that many would consider abundant with undocumented workers, it is probably inflated.  To err on the conservative side, the study increases the estimated total cost by 25%.  So, not only is the cost most likely a bit lower than the estimate, the cost to the individual taxpayer is probably less than the $11 each that the study arrives at.

 

Do you think that maybe most hospitals are full of elderly? And that 99% of nursing homes are over the age of 64? Those are free of course. How about the US citizens at birth who receive free hospital care, with free medicine, etc.. How much is each baby with all that support? $10,000 each? That's fair because that's the US average. $10,000 is nothing for a baby at a hospital WITHOUT medicine. How many babies that are illegal are born here? In the thousands would be a good guess. 20 million illegal immigrants having 10,000 babies is $10,000,000 yearly. How about their food stamps, medicines, sicknesses as a child?

 

Each child in the US costs on average $9,200 per year (http://sheilawraygregoire.com/costofhavingababyp32.php). How we have 20 million illegals in the country. You do the math Einstein.

 

How about the elderly and nursing homes? How about their hospital care? That's free according to your numbers of $11 per household (a stat which is totally incorrect).

 

Your problem is that not only did you not bother to read any part of the study, you also refuse to believe the numbers because they don't fit your own "observations."  That's makes you a god-damned idiot.

 

Don't you feel smart. You are the jackoff who posted $11 per family.

 

We have 260 million Americans, and the average family is 4 people. That's roughly 45 million families. Now what's 45 million families into $1,100,000? It's not $11 you jacka$$. Using your own figures it makes no sense. It doesn't fit in the cost of each child for birthing and child raising, or the elderly who cost $20,000-$30,000 a year in a nursing home, hospital care, medicines, etc.. You are a lemming who can't think further than the liberals can throw you.

 

20,000,000 illegals... how many do you think are in a nursing home? Is 2,000 a low enough figure for you? One in 10,000 people a low enough figure for you? That's another $40,000,000 conservatively. That's just .1% of the population. How about the cost of guarding the border? These people aren't cheap, they cost more than you will ever realize because you can't think at all. Was 3rd grade that hard for you?

 

I'll tell you what, stop telling people to pay for people breaking the law. Go from house to house and ask what people pay in Social Service taxes, tell them you will reimburse them for the money they pay to illegals before you tell me I should pay for them. Shut your piehole until you do so you hypocrite.

[GG]

We're not arguing, we're discussing issues over a nice bottle of wine.  Have you not read my avatar? 

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Add a few Ultracets, and it's a really fun discussion...

[mike1011]

It's published in a peer reviewed journal, you !@#$ing jackass! 

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I give peer-reviewed journals less credence because of their beliefs that pedophilia isn't wrong if the child consents, and other great findings of the idiots running this country into the ground.

 

Go shock yourself and read the American Psychology Association peer reviewed studies and tell me if you agree with them. Then go through each spending bill approved by peer-reviewed studies and tell me how 50% make any sense as far as what should be spent and what is spent.

[Chef Jim]

Add a few Ultracets, and it's a really fun discussion...

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I'm thinking this thread actually needs burritos and tequila. Yeeeha!

[Johnny Coli]

Other then you, noone mentioned hispanics.  Everyone said illegals.  But again you !@#$ing assume.  Hispanics are not the only illegals in this country.

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I don't assume anything, Bill. The freaking study was of households that contained immigrants that spoke either english or spanish in the LA area. Unless LA had a huge influx of undocumented irishmen that I didn't know about, then the study, and we, are speaking about predominantly hispanics. And, once again, you didn't even read the last sentence in the post I made explaining that I know not all undocumented workers are hispanic.

[GG]

I'm thinking this thread actually needs burritos and tequila.  Yeeeha!

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Breakfast, yum.

[Johnny Coli]

It's published in a peer reviewed journal, you !@#$ing jackass! 

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You would think that someone so up on statistics would know that.

 

Mea culpa btw, for linking to the actual article without realizing it was subscription-only. I get the science journals for free, and it didn't show up that way on my screen. However, the Rand Corp press release does an excellent job of summarizing the results. But he didn't read that either, apparently.

[Johnny Coli]

Nope, I'm right.

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From the press release (that you obviously didn't read) on the study:

Just a small fraction of America's health care spending is used to provide publicly supported care to the nation's undocumented immigrants, according to a RAND Corporation study issued today.

 

Overall, immigrants to the United States use relatively few health services, primarily because they are generally healthier than their American-born counterparts, according to the study by the nonprofit research organization.

 

The report – which appears in the November edition of the journal Health Affairs – estimates that in the United States about $1.1 billion in federal, state and local government funds are spent annually on health care for undocumented immigrants aged 18 to 64. That amounts to an average of $11 in taxes for each U.S. household.

 

In contrast, a total of $88 billion in government funds were spent on health care for all non-elderly adults in 2000.

 

“Our findings show a relatively small amount of tax money is spent on health services provided to undocumented immigrants,” said James P. Smith, the RAND chair in Labor Market and Demographic Studies and an author of the report. “Costs will be much higher for educating the children of undocumented immigrants, so that's where debate should center, not on these relatively small health care costs.”

 

The other authors of the new report are: Dana Goldman, chair and director of health economics at RAND; and Neeraj Sood, an associate economist at RAND.

 

Smith also was an author of the often-cited National Academy of Science publication on immigration titled “The New Americans.”

 

Don't you feel smart. You are the jackoff who posted $11 per family.

 

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Yes, I feel smart.

[Johnny Coli]

I give peer-reviewed journals less credence

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Yes, why believe peer-reviewed science journals when we can rely on your unbiased observations.

[GG]

  Yes, why believe peer-reviewed science journals when we can rely on your unbiased observations.

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You mean the ones that say that US has 45 mil families? Or the one about 260 mil people?

[mike1011]

From the press release (that you obviously didn't read) on the study:

Yes, I feel smart.

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$11 per family is not smart, it's fuggin stupid. Do the math, unless you are counting all the families of the world.

[Johnny Coli]

Because not all of you can get the Journal article without purchasing it (which isn't uncommon, most aren't free), I wil paste the study methods. The data is summarized nicely in the press release that I linked to in the fourth or fifth post, that apparently some of you didn't bother to read. (If Ken or Darin think this is pushing the copywrite limits I'll delete this post. This is the methods only, though.)

 

Research on immigrants’ health is limited by severe constraints on the quality of available data. Most health surveys include the foreign-born in proportion to their population representation, which, given the heterogeneity of immigrant groups, limits the scope of research. The information on immigrants’ attributes is often sparse, because general surveys are principally targeted to non-immigrant populations. Crucial information such as immigrants’ legal status is frequently missing because of either a perceived sensitivity about the question or the limited numbers of undocumented immigrants expected in the survey sample.

 

To remedy these defects, we used data from the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS), a study conducted in 2000 of families in a stratified random sample of sixty-five neighborhoods in LA County, with oversampling of poor neighborhoods. Households without someone who could speak English or Spanish were not eligible for interview, but they represent only 3.5 percent of the county’s total population. Among the 3,086 adults selected for interview, 2,620 (85 percent) started the interview, and 2,543 (82 percent) completed it.5 Because LAFANS samples are quite small for those over age sixty-four and the provision of care and health costs are so different for the elderly population, we limited our analysis to adults ages 18–64. Nationally, 86 percent of adult immigrants and 97 percent of adult undocumented immigrants in 2000 were in this age group.

 

There are several advantages of LAFANS for research on immigrants’ health care use and costs. First, it has detailed information on immigrants’ legal or visa status. Second, information is available on health status, type and amount of health care used, and health insurance.

 

To assess immigrant and legal status, participants were asked their country of origin. The foreign-born were then asked if they were U.S. citizens; "yes" was coded as "immigrant citizen." Permanent residency was determined by whether noncitizens reported having a "permanent residence card or green card." The remaining foreign-born were asked if they had a document allowing them to stay in the United States for a limited time. Anyone answering "yes" and whose documents had not expired was classified as "non-immigrant." The remainder are the "undocumented." This method of determining immigrants’ status represents best practice in immigrant surveys.6

 

Use of health care. Outpatient use was defined as the number of times a respondent visited a doctor, nurse, or other health professional in the past year. Respondents reported whether they had ever visited a doctor for a routine checkup or for an illness or injury. Inpatient use was measured as the number of visits to a hospital or mental health facility for an overnight stay or longer in the past two years.

 

Per capita costs. LAFANS collects self-reported information on outpatient and inpatient use but not on costs. To assign expenditures (akin to "prices") to the reported use of services, we used an imputation procedure from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).8

 

The 1999 and 2000 MEPS collected data on health services use, costs, and sources of payment. We constructed utilization measures in the MEPS data that mapped to those in LAFANS: number of hospitalizations in the prior two years (1999–2000) and number of outpatient visits in 2000. Comparisons of average per capita use between the two data sets corresponded quite closely. To identify the relationship between self-reported use and spending, we regressed total spending in the MEPS data in 2000 on these two utilization measures with indicators for age group (18–44, 45–64), sex, years of education, region, and ethnicity. We also included interactions between each of these indicators and our two utilization measures. Thus, our cost model allows prices of inpatient and outpatient care to vary by region, ethnicity, and other characteristics.

 

Compared with national health accounts, MEPS data understate total costs by anywhere from 6 percent to 25 percent.9 This is because some indirect measures of health care spending—for example, general subsidies to public hospitals and clinics—are not explicitly tied to individual use. Thus, we conservatively inflated all of our cost estimates by 25 percent. Spending was allocated to public, private, and out-of-pocket sources based on insurance coverage, ethnicity, and sex. The breakdown by ethnicity is especially important because one might think that the native-born have more generous insurance or are less likely to default on their medical spending than is the case for immigrants.

 

This method is similar to an approach wherein expenditures are assigned based on mean costs by subpopulation group, but with an important difference. We also used data on health care utilization, which varies greatly within these demographic groups, as another predictor of costs in the regression model. This method greatly improved the fit of the model, so that we can explain more than 60 percent of the variation in individual spending. Separate models were estimated for participants with no hospitalizations or outpatient visits; only outpatient visits; and some hospitalizations (with or without outpatient visits). Split-sample analysis demonstrated that this three-part classification performed better than single-equation estimation. Using the estimated regressions from the MEPS data, we then imputed costs for LAFANS respondents based on their reported rates of utilization, sex, years of education, and ethnicity.

 

County and national costs. To get population-level estimates of aggregate spending, we multiplied per capita estimates by the population subgroup based on sex and nativity. LA County population estimates are available through LAFANS and were crosschecked with the census data. National population estimates for natives, naturalized citizens, and nonnaturalized foreign-born residents are from the 2000 Current Population Survey (CPS). The nonnaturalized foreign-born were divided into permanent legal residents, legal temporary immigrants, and undocumented based on estimates by Jeffrey Passel, a leading national expert, and his colleagues.10 National costs across all population groups and the division into private, public, and out-of-pocket costs were normalized to correspond to MEPS totals.