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New York Must Provide Medicaid to Immigrants

Originally published by The Associated Press, June 5, 2001

ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — New York must provide Medicaid to thousands of legal immigrants denied health care under welfare reform acts, the state’s highest court ruled Tuesday.

The Court of Appeals unanimously decided that the state’s denial of benefits to poor, legal immigrants since 1996 is unconstitutional.

Most of these immigrants had been eligible only for emergency room care including treatment for diabetes and asthma, conditions which can require continuing care to avoid deaths.

The result can be long hospital stays because physicians can’t release the immigrants without a plan for continuing health care, or the patients are discharged into a “cycle of emergency, recovery, stabilization, deterioration and the onset of another emergency,” the court said.

In March, the New York Immigration Coalition estimated as many as 167,000 adult immigrants are affected. The coalition said the cost of providing Medicaid coverage to this group would be about $5.1 million in the fiscal year that began April 1 and $34 million over three years. The state Health Department had no immediate comment on the ruling.