Who knew they had such authority?

Another in a long line of media tear-jerkers for illegal aliens

Hospitals deporting uninsured patients

Eight years ago, Jimenez, now 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Jimenez was deported, not by the federal government but by Martin Memorial Hospital. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.

Since returning home, Jimenez, who sustained a traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication — just Alka-Seltzer and prayer, said his 72-year-old mother. In the past year, his condition has deteriorated with routine seizures.

“Every time, he loses a little more of himself,” said his mother, Petrona Gervacio Gaspar.

Jimenez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. Many U.S. hospitals are repatriating seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

U.S. immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations. Most hospital officials said that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland.

But the hospitals are operating without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions.

So they get themselves messed up in the US, or they come here sick, and illegal, from another country, and the US taxpayer is now on the hook for them for the rest of their lives?

Yes, according to the open borders creeps who are demanding that either Medicare or Medicaid be made to pay for the care of non-citizens or that the charitable giving requirement of community hospitals be spent on people living here illegally and not on those who cannot afford to pay their heathcare bills and are actually citizens.

No. No. And no.