NEW YORK POST – President Biden’s ongoing border crisis has left an Arizona hospital holding the bag for $20 million in unpaid bills racked up by migrants who needed treatment — including expensive surgery and intensive care — during just the past six months.
Dr. Bob Transchel, president and CEO of Yuma Regional Medical Center, said Friday neither the federal nor state governments have been willing to help out his 406-bed, nonprofit facility.
“There’s no payer source for those individuals,” Transchel told Fox News. “Everybody’s sympathetic and they lend a listening ear, but nobody is offering a payer source for these individuals. It’s an unsustainable business model.”
Transchel said that “anybody that walks through our door is gonna get the same level of care as anybody else,” adding that migrants “come in that need dialysis, that need heart surgery, that need cardiac catheterization.”
“We’ve had women come in to our labor delivery unit that have delivered infants that need to be in the neonatal ICU, for sometimes months at time,” he said.
Some migrants require treatment for traumatic injuries sustained while trekking across the border, Transchel said.
“A lot of it, though — interestingly — is really complications of chronic diseases that have been previously uncared for,” he added.
Transchel said over more than a year, the cost treating migrants at Yuma Regional had “basically doubled, and it will continue to increase.”
“We operate on a 2-to-3% margin annually. This year is not looking very good from a financial perspective and really that’s — a lot of that is due to these uncompensated costs,” he said.
Transchel’s comments came as Customs and Border Protection sources told Fox News overwhelmed agents have logged more than 575,000 migrant encounters along the southwest border since Oct. 1, the start of fiscal year 2023 … READ MORE.
