Staying Away from the Doctor
Some pundits and politicians grumble that immigrants are a drain on the American health-care system, but a new study found immigrants pay more toward medical expenses than they withdraw, thus helping to subsidize the public and private U.S. health-insurance markets. First author Lila Flavin, M19, collaborated with colleagues at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance on the paper, recently published in the International Journal of Health Services. They reviewed all post-2000, peer-reviewed studies related to health-care expenditures by immigrants in the United States available through the PubMed database.
Flavin, who worked as a Spanish translator at an outpatient clinic when she was an undergraduate at Princeton University, said she “started hearing rhetoric that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, are a burden to our health-care system. I wanted to look at the data and see if there was any truth to it.”
Tufts Now spoke to Flavin about the study—and its implications.