The Trump administration’s move to give deportation officials access to Medicaid data is putting hospitals and states in a bind as they weigh whether to alert immigrant patients that their personal information, including home addresses, could be used in efforts to remove them from the country.
Warning patients could deter them from signing up for a program called Emergency Medicaid, through which the government reimburses hospitals for the cost of emergency treatment for immigrants who are ineligible for standard Medicaid coverage.
But if hospitals don’t disclose that the patients’ information is shared with federal law enforcement, they might not know that their medical coverage puts them at risk of being located by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“If hospitals tell people that their Emergency Medicaid information will be shared with ICE, it is foreseeable that many immigrants would simply stop getting emergency medical treatment,” said Leonardo Cuello, a research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families. “Half of the Emergency Medicaid cases are for the delivery of U.S. citizen babies. Do we want these mothers avoiding the hospital when they go into labor?”
For more than a decade, hospitals and states have assured patients that their personal information, including their home addresses and immigration status, would not be shared with immigration enforcement officials when they apply for federal health care coverage. A 2013 ICE policy memo guaranteed the agency would not use information from health coverage applications for enforcement activities.
But that changed last year, after President …