Many health experts and clinicians have voiced concerns about the potential harms of a new Florida law that requires hospitals to ask patients about their immigration status, though hospital leaders in the state have stayed quieter on the issue, KFF Health News reported Aug. 17.
The law, which took effect July 1, requires hospitals that accept Medicaid to ask patients about their immigration status on admission and registration forms. Hospitals are required to submit a quarterly report with this information to the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration, the agency that oversees hospitals in the state.
Florida officials argue the law will offer more transparency about how illegal immigration is affecting Florida's healthcare system.
"Collecting this data allows taxpayers to understand where their hard-earned dollars are being exploited," Bailey Smith, the agency's communications director, told KFF Health News.
Many physicians, nurses and health policy experts have voiced their opposition to the law, saying it will deter marginalized people from seeking care and put lives at risk. However, hospitals in Florida counties with high immigrant populations have demonstrated a more muted response, according to the report.
A spokesperson for Miami-based Jackson Health System said the new law "will have almost no impact" on the organization or its patients. At Hollywood, Fla.-based Memorial Healthcare System, staff are using digital forms to ask patients about their immigration status, though the health system will "continue to care for all," spokesperson Yanet Obarrio-Sanchez told KFF Health News.
Olveen Carrasquillo, MD, a practicing physician and professor at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, highlighted a financial component of the issue to KFF Health News.
"Imagine if all the hospitals said, 'This is wrong. We can't do it.' But they just stay silent because they may lose state funding," Dr. Carrasquillo said.