A Bitter Pill for MD Immigrants

[MountainLaurel]

Seldom does a budget cut help cripple a child.

Yet when Maryland cut $7 million last year and eliminated health care coverage for some recent immigrants, surgery was canceled on Eelaaf Zahid's malformed hip. Now, as her family looks to the courts and other state programs for help, an outgrown medical device implanted in her hip three years ago protrudes from her small body. The Glen Burnie kindergartener walks with a limp.

In Hyattsville, Brayan Herrera, 7, is waiting to see a doctor. His mother, Martha, worries that the rashes and pain he experiences are signs that his rare blood disease has returned.

More than 3,000 children lost Medicaid coverage in July, an issue that has inspired a high-level policy debate among Maryland lawmakers, officials, lawyers and judges -- and a desperate struggle among the parents, all of them poor but legal immigrants, to navigate a complex patchwork of programs in search of care for their children.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/16/AR2006021602319.html

:cry:

[FormerDittoHead]

1. That 7 year old should take personal responsibility!

By not having saved for her medical care in a BushCo medical savings plan, that 7 year old knew the chances she was taking.

It's best we show the "tough love" and let these 7 year olds with their protruding medical devices and help them find their inner "excellence".

It's sad that I have to include this icon:
:sarcasm:

edited for icon syntax

[Strawman]

2. is this in Potterville, MD?

[Virginian]

3. This is a fall out from the federal govt cutting medicaid to immigrants.

The states can't afford to continue picking up the bill.

The state's decision on recent immigrants is a legacy of the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996. With that act, Congress made most legal immigrants ineligible for federal programs and cash assistance in their first five years in the United States.

In the years since, more than 20 governments -- including those of Maryland, Virginia and the District -- have used their money to provide health coverage to these recent immigrants.

<snip> ...

McCann has also said the newly arrived immigrants have health care options that other low-income residents don't. "The fact is, they have sponsors" who are backing them for citizenship, McCann said in hearings on the issue in Annapolis. "They have alternatives."

Her doctors knew this cut-off was going to happen. Why didn't they move her operation up a month earlier? The state shouldn't have cut the benefits to those who were already depending on them, but the good news is that the little girl will have here Medicaid benefits restored next December after they have been here for five years. After that point she will be able to get subsequent treatment. The bad news is that she will be growing and her condition will worsen until then, so she needs her operation now.

Eelaaf's father, a chemistry professor in Pakistan who is now a gas station manager, has no sponsor because he and his family moved here four years ago after winning a green card lottery.