The New York Times details the case of Luis Alberto Jiménez, 35, an uninsured illegal immigrant from Guatemala, who suffered “devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian” eight years ago and was cared for as a charity case until the hospital could no longer afford to keep him:

A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported - not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it. …

Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border. …

Hospital administrators view these cases as costly, burdensome patient transfers that force them to shoulder responsibility for the dysfunctional immigration and health-care systems. In many cases, they say, the only alternative to repatriations is keeping patients indefinitely in acute-care hospitals.

“What that does for us, it puts a strain on our system, where we’re unable to provide adequate care for our own citizens,” said Alan B. Kelly, vice president of Scottsdale Healthcare in Arizona. “A full bed is a full bed.”

As tragic as this case is – Jiménez is deteriorating because he is receiving sub-standard care in Guatemala – American hospitals cannot afford to provide state-of-the-art long-term acute care for free. And they don’t – they make American citizens who have insurance pay the freight for uninsured illegal aliens. 

The Wall Street Journal reports that an increasing number of Americans are racking up million-dollar hospital tabs – and not because they are receiving cutting-edge treatment:

As spending on health care has climbed to almost $2 trillion a year, or 16% of the U.S. economy, the number of Americans burdened with massive medical bills has soared as well. According to a 2005 survey by the Commonwealth Fund, an estimated 34% of adults aged 19 to 64 face problems with medical bills or have accrued medical debt. A majority of those people - 62% - had health insurance, the survey found. …

Part of the problem: Even as medical progress and new technologies raise health-care costs, health plans have been slow to raise their caps. …

Another issue is the widespread practice of bill padding by hospitals and other health providers. While hospitals say bill padding is their only defense against the aggressive cost-reduction efforts of insurers and government programs, the end result is that individuals can, with little warning, be left stuck with wildly inflated medical bills.

Patients reach these caps mighty quickly when the hospital is charging $750 for support hose to reduce post-surgical blot clots in the legs.

And to make sure they can squeeze every dime out of patients, many hospitals now run credit checks on patients to gauge how likely they are to pay the sky-high prices they will be charged. Some hospitals are going so far as to demand cash upfront before initiating chemo when they deem patients to be underinsured.

It’s not just government cost-cutting driving these trends. Hospitals are legally on the hook to provide emergency medical care to illegal aliens – half of whom are either uninsured or on Medicare – and if they can’t shift enough of the financial burden on to other patients they go under. In Los Angeles, some 60 hospitals have closed their ERs just to stay afloat, and NJ has been particularly hit hard by hospitals going belly up:

New Jersey law requires that hospitals treat anyone who walks through their doors, and then get reimbursed later by the state. But the state's looming budget shortfall has forced it to cut back on the reimbursements, leaving hospitals to pick up the tab. And hospitals, in turn, are going broke: Six have closed in the past 18 months, and half of those remaining are operating in the red.

As the economy falters, the number of uninsured is likely to grow, and so will the burden on hospitals. And with more hospitals expected to shut their doors, New Jersey faces a nasty culmination of health-care crises. …

[A]lmost everyone agrees that a key underlying problem is the lack of universal health insurance.

Some of the uninsured are new immigrants from Mexico and Central America who are moving into the town. …

The New Jersey Hospital Association estimates that about 15 percent of New Jersey's population, or about 1.3 million people, lack health insurance. …

Illegal immigrants by law cannot apply for charity care. But by law, they must also be treated at New Jersey hospitals, which cannot ask for proof of citizenship. …

But many of the closing hospitals have been in urban areas and towns with large concentrations of minority and poor residents. Two hospitals in Newark - St. James and Columbus Hospital - closed this year, angering local officials. Mayor Cory Booker (D) said he was "angry and anguished and frustrated" by the closings.

By the way, Newark is a sanctuary city – which means it’s a magnet for uninsured illegal aliens, and there will likely be more hospital closings in the city’s future.

What Saudi Women Want

A Turkish soap opera featuring a fashion designer named Noor and her tall, blond, blue-eyed husband, Muhannad, who is “romantic, respectful and treats his wife … as both a love object and an equal” is sowing seeds of discord between Saudi husbands and wives, reports The Washington Post:

Millions of people - especially women, apparently - are tuning in nightly to find out whether the couple will stay together or be torn apart by jealousies and old flames.

But “Noor,” the story of a multi-generational, upper-class Turkish family, has also sparked a backlash. The show has become the subject of angry Friday sermons in this strict Islamic kingdom, and the country's chief cleric recently issued a fatwa calling it "decadent" and sinful to watch.

“Noor” has had such a deep influence because, unlike American or Mexican soap operas broadcast here, it is about a Muslim family living in a Muslim country. The show is also dubbed in an Arabic dialect, not classical Arabic, which makes it easier to understand and feels more intimate to viewers.

And then, there's that husband. …

“Saudi women fantasize about what they're lacking,” said Amira Kashgari, an assistant linguistics professor at King Abdul Aziz University who writes about social issues for al-Watan newspaper. …

Many women have said to their husbands, 'Why can't you be more like Muhannad?' "

According to several local newspapers, Saudi men have divorced their wives after finding photos of Muhannad on their cellphones or because they found their wives too taken with the Turk with the soulful eyes.

Saudi women are likely to find love and romance only on TV. Keep in mind that Saudi Arabia has banned roses and anything red that may be exchanged as love tokens on Valentine’s Day, the country’s religious authorities deeming celebration of the holiday “sinful” (fourth item). And a Saudi court just upheld an eight months prison sentence and jail and 600 lashes against biochemist Khalid Zahrani for “establishing a telephone relationship” with a female student who divorced her husband after seven months of marriage, reports Reuters. The student was sentenced to four months in jail and 350 lashes. If the two of them had had real sex instead of telephone sex, heads would roll.

So what’s a love-starved Muslim woman to do? Maybe end it all – taking out a few infidels too, while she’s at it. Not exactly, according to a New York Times op-ed by University of Chicago doctoral student Lindsey O’Rourke plumbs the motivation of female suicide bombers in Iraq and elsewhere:

Women, we are told, become suicide bombers out of despair, mental illness, religiously mandated subordination to men, frustration with sexual inequality and a host of other factors related specifically to their gender. …

The only problem: There is precious little evidence of uniquely feminine motivations driving women’s attacks. …

So, what does motivate female suicide attackers? Surprisingly similar motives driving men to blow themselves up on terrorist missions.

For one, 95 percent of female suicide attacks occurred within the context of a military campaign against foreign occupying forces, suggesting that, at a macro level, the main strategic logic is to create or maintain territorial sovereignty for their ethnic group.

Correspondingly, the primary individual motivation for both male and female suicide bombers is a deep loyalty to their communities combined with a variety of personal grievances against enemy forces. …

[T]he strategic appeal of female attacks stems from the rules about women’s behavior in the societies where these attacks take place. Given their second-class citizenship in many of these countries, women generate less suspicion and are better able to conceal explosives. Moreover, since female attacks are considered especially shocking, they are more likely to generate significant news media attention for both domestic and foreign audiences.

The author proposes that suicide bombing will become less alluring to women as more U.S. troops leave Iraq.