By Linda Thom
02/11/2014
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has issued a report with the sleeper title, “Source of Payment for the Delivery: Births in a 33-state and District of Columbia Reporting Area, 2010”[PDF]. But that’s not the only reason the Main Stream Media did not pick the CDC report up — its bad news about our current immigrant inflow is just not “fit to print”.
The CDC report contains staggering data about health insurance coverage, or lack of it, for mothers giving birth in 2010. Note that “self-pay” really means no insurance coverage.
As the CDC puts it:
The majority of mothers with self-pay were born outside the 50 states and District of Columbia (55.8%), compared with 18% of privately insured mothers and 27.1% of mothers on Medicaid. The vast majority of uninsured Hispanic mothers (86.7%) were born outside the United States and District of Columbia. [Emphases added]Simply stated, of the 742,401 immigrant birth-mothers included in this report, only 18% had private health insurance. The remainder funded deliveries using Medicaid (27%)…or they were not insured at all.
(Note that the insurance data come from birth certificates and are therefore 100% reliable. Birth certificates from only 33 states are included in the report on insurance because the federal government revised birth certificates in 2003 and in 2010 and not all states were using the new form with insurance information. But California and Texas — the biggies — were included in the report.)
Will Obama’s Affordable Care Act make a difference? Will granting Amnesty to illegal alien women make a difference?
No — because of the demographic composition of immigrants coming to the U.S. under current and proposed law.
From the CDC report: “Hispanic mothers (8.2% of Hispanic births) were more than twice as likely” as any other racial or ethnic group to be uninsured. Hispanic women of Central and South American origins were the most likely to be uninsured (13.3%).
For all Hispanic birth mothers, native-born and immigrant, 61% of births were funded by Medicaid, the taxpayer-funded means-tested, welfare program of health coverage for low income and poor people. Medicaid funded three-quarters of teen births and almost two-thirds (65.5%) of births to unmarried women. The CDC report adds: “Uninsured mothers were the most likely to have less than a high school education (44%).”
Almost half of immigrants to the US are Hispanic, mostly Mexicans and Central and South Americans. Unfortunately, they and their children and grandchildren represent a disproportionate number of unmarried parents, teen parents and uneducated parents.
They are poor and they continue to be poor, generation after generation. Amnesty will not fix this.
We know this from the birth data. The CDC maintains records from all birth certificates throughout the country, containing information about nativity, race, ethnicity, educational attainment of mothers and fathers, type of delivery, ad nauseum. Here’s the questionnaire that birth parents must complete — the U.S. Standard Certificate Of Live Birth PDF. From this information, the CDC publishes a report every year with birth statistics. Here is the report for 2010 — Births: Final Data for 2010, August 28, 2012. [PDF]
It shows that, in 2010, 3,999,386 women gave birth and of those 945,180 were Hispanic (23.6%). Of the 372,175 births to teens, one third (33.2%) were Hispanic. Of the 1,633,471 births to unmarried women, 504,411 (31%) were to Hispanic mothers. In 2010, 44% of Hispanic birth mothers were U.S.-born and 56% foreign-born.
The CDC does not publish educational data from birth certificates. But the California Department of Public Health does. [Number And Percent Of Live Births With Selected Demographic Characteristics By Race/Ethnic Group (PDF)]
In 2010, 509,979 births occurred in California. Of those half, 257,269, were to Hispanic mothers and of those women, 40% had less than 12 years of schooling. Moreover, in 2010, of the 134,500 mothers who were not high school graduates, 105,259 (78%) were Hispanic.
The Hispanic fathers were even more poorly educated than the mothers.
In California, of the 43,560 births to teens, three-quarters were to Hispanic teens. Two-thirds of the births to unmarried women were Hispanic women.
Were all these women immigrants? No. Almost half of Hispanic birth-mothers (47.7%) were born in the United States — but of course many of these are the daughters of recent legal and illegal immigrants.
This is the future we face. We cannot fix health care — we cannot fix income inequality — we cannot win a War on Poverty — when legions of the poor are continually imported from the Third World.
Amnesty will not fix this. Amnesty will not get this problem “behind us.”
We must stop disaster being inflicted upon America.
Linda Thom is a retiree and refugee from California, now living in Washington State. She formerly worked as an officer for a major bank and as a budget analyst for the County Administrator of Santa Barbara
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.