Florida Reform Slashes Free Healthcare Spending on Migrants

Florida’s healthcare spending on illegal migrants has been nearly cut in half since legislation now requires hospitals to track unpaid care given to illegal migrants.

Senate Bill 1718, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), went into effect in July of 2023, and with almost a full year in effect the results are stunning. While the bill does not require that illegals be denied care that hospitals know will never be paid for, the amount of those unpaid bills has decreased considerably in the year since migrants have been asked for their immigration status.

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The new reporting system has confirmed a 54 percent drop in Medicaid spending since the law took effect last year, according to Politico.

While the results have not been thoroughly proven to be a direct result of the reporting requirement, state Republicans are hailing the law as a success.

Unsurprisingly, advocates for illegals are stunned and dismayed by the law and have accused Republicans of using the reporting requirement to chase illegals out of Florida.

“Obviously, there’s been somewhat of an exodus of migrants in Florida,” Thomas Kennedy of the Florida Immigrant Coalition told Politico. “When this was all going through — we had warned about the exacerbated work[force] shortages and the distressed industries — we said this would be a bad idea.”

Some Republicans who advocate for cheap labor have also found the law to be problematic. Republican state Rep. Rick Roth — who did vote for the law — tried to get proactive in the wake of the passage of the law in 2023 and quickly organized visits to local Florida farms to urge migrants not to leave the state, but to stay in Florida and not abandon their agricultural jobs, NPR reported last June.

Roth’s issue was that the bill also requires companies with more than 25 employees to run new hires through the E-Verify database to determine if the applicant is legally allowed to work in the U.S.A.

Whether the law has any teeth or not, as Breitbart News has reported, the bill determined that hospitals in Florida have been stuck with more than $566 million in unpaid bills, a total that DeSantis and supporters of the law say is proof of the heavy toll illegal migration takes on the state in both the public and private sectors.

Since the implementation of the law, the huge amount of money laid out by hospitals to pay for care to illegals has been tabulated for public consumption. To name just a few examples, Manatee Memorial Hospital reported spending $21.2 million on unpaid care for illegals, Broward County has lost $43,056,022 in 2024, Duval has suffered a loss of $31,439,143, Hillsborough’s loss is at $58,822,134, Orange stands at $58,328,521, and Miami-Dade has lost a whopping $231,804,144.

While Florida may be finally getting a handle on these outrageous expenditures in health care, the same is occurring unrecognized in every state in the Union. One man from Chicago, Illinois, who said he is a nurse at a hospital, spoke to Right Side Broadcasting Network’s Vanessa Broussard last week during a Trump rally in Racine, Wisconsin, and noted that his hospital is swamped with people who can’t speak English.

WATCH — Migrant Surge in Arizona Crippling Border Patrol Resources:

Randy Clark / Breitbart Texas

He blasted Chicago for its leniency on free health care for illegals, saying, “Yeah, they can go into the ER and get free care. I mean, I don’t think they’ll turn anybody away, but it’s just a drag on the system.”

He went on and added, “I’ve taken care of patients that… don’t speak any English, they don’t have any documentation of US citizenship, and it’s just a drag on our system. And then there’s so many diseases that were eradicated at some point in this country like measles and TB, and we’re seeing a resurgence of that. It’s not good, it’s really not good.”

“There’s so many Americans here that need help. There’s so many people with mental health problems that are on the street, homeless veterans. That’s like they’re just being kicked to the curb while we’re taking care of people that don’t belong here,” he exclaimed.

Health care is far from the only sector where Biden’s tidal wave of illegals is putting a huge dent in services for American citizens. Education is another area where the influx of illegals has pushed Americans out of the way in order to serve Biden’s border crossers.

A story in the Washington Post, for instance, focused on Rotterdam, New York’s school district, which was inundated with 30,000 migrants who pushed their children into the area’s schools to get their “free” education.

But the city’s schools didn’t just push more of its budget into serving non-English-speaking students. They also expanded school services into areas in which schools have no business engaging, such as welfare services, giving out clothing, aiding in housing, providing medical care, and a host of other activities that turn schools into welfare agencies.

“These are our students,” school superintendent Shannon Shine proudly told the paper. “We’ll take care of them.”

While the teachers and school administrators in the Post’s story were thrilled to be turned into providers of social services, they also necessarily had turned away from helping needy Americans in a similar manner because all these resources have been turned very directly to the children of illegals.

Florida is finally trying to put a price tag on all this catering to Joe Biden’s illegals. The cost is steep, indeed, and it remains to be seen if every other state will follow Florida’s example.

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