By Kelly Kennedy
USA Today, May 29, 2013
WASHINGTON — Immigrants contributed about $115 billion more from their paychecks to the Medicare Trust Fund than they took out over a seven-year period in the last decade, according to researchers at Harvard Medical School.
As the Senate debates a new immigration bill and House Republicans work toward a bill that restricts access to government services for unauthorized immigrants who become legal citizens, the researchers concluded in a study released Wednesday that restricting immigration could deplete the fund.
Researchers looked at data from 2002 to 2009.
“The assumption that immigrants are just a drain has been a part of the argument that people should be denied services,” said Leah Zallman, lead researcher and an instructor at Harvard Medical School. “Immigration policy has been closely linked to Medicare’s finances.”
Studies had shown that immigrants use less health care than U.S.-born people, including in government programs, but no one had looked at their contributions to those programs.
In 2009, the researchers found, immigrants contributed $13.9 billion more to the Medicare Trust Fund than they used, while U.S.-born people spent $31 billion more than they contributed. Immigrants, Zallman said, essentially subsidize U.S. health care.
“I was surprised by the degree of subsidy,” Zallman said. “We didn’t see any changes in the amount of the [immigrant] subsidy each year, but there was a decline in net contribution of U.S.-born citizens.”
They found that immigrants ages 18 to 64 on average contributed only about $100 less a year than did U.S.-born people, which is contrary to conventional wisdom that immigrants don’t earn enough to contribute. Both U.S.-born citizens and immigrants older than 64 contributed less than they used: $3,333 for the U.S.-born and $2,099 for immigrants.
“We should carefully examine these assumptions that have led to denial of care,” Zallman said. She said the study was unable to include undocumented immigrants who paid into the system illegally through fake Social Security numbers.
The difference comes because there are more immigrants of working age than retirement age. The U.S.-born population is aging at a faster rate than it is creating a workforce to pay into the fund. Immigrants often go home after they retire or they’re ineligible to receive benefits because of their immigrant status, Zallman said.
“Baby Boomers are coming into retirement,” she said. “We’re not seeing that same decline in the immigrant population.
“Immigration policy has been closely linked to Medicare’s finances,” she said. The authors said allowing legal status for undocumented immigrants could mean more “on-the-books” employment, as well as higher-paying jobs. That, in turn, could mean more money for the fund.
“Encouraging a steady flow of young immigrants would help offset the aging of the U.S. population and the health care financing challenge that it presents,” states the report, which was published in the magazine Health Affairs.
A recent Heritage Foundation study predicted the United States would lose $6.3 trillion if it passed the Senate immigration law. The law would legalize 11 million unauthorized immigrants. One of the authors of the study was later found to have argued in his doctoral dissertation at Harvard in 2009 that immigrants naturally have a lower IQ than the “native white population” of the USA.
See additional coverage of the Health Affairs study at The New York Times, Reuters, Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Kaiser Health News, Modern Healthcare, MedPage Today, Bloomberg News, NBC Latino, The Hill, Becker’s Hospital Review, National Journal, and CBS News, among other media outlets.