Health Care

Joe Lancaster | 9.18.2024 4:20 PM

When immigration opponents make the case for closing the country's borders, one common argument is the costs that immigrants incur. But recent statistics throw cold water on those claims, finding that the foreign-born actually use fewer public health dollars than people born in the U.S.

"Immigrant households have much higher use of…Medicaid (42 percent vs. 23 percent)" than native-born households, according to a 2015 report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

"Prior research indicates that there are 5.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants in the country in 2019, accounting for a little over one-fifth of the total population without health insurance," CIS Director of Research Steven Camarota told a congressional subcommittee in January. "The costs of providing care to them likely totals some $7 billion annually," though he admitted that number could be lower since "immigrants in general tend to consume somewhat less health care than the U.S.-born, primarily because they are relatively young."

Not so, says the data.

The Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) is "a set of large-scale surveys" of Americans and their medical providers that "collects........

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