Treating illegal alien cancer patients

The University of Texas Medical Branch has a problem. It's suffering a budget shortfall, and is considering a proposal to quit offering cancer treatment to new indigent patients who are illegal aliens. From the story:

About 5.4 million Texans, or 24.6 percent of the state's population, is uninsured, according to a 2005 report by the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts. Noncitizens are almost three times as likely to be uninsured as native U.S. citizens, the report says. [snip] Medical branch physicians, many of whom work there because of its mission to help the poor, are anguished and conflicted about the prospect of turning patients away, said Dr. Howard Brody, chair of the medical branch's ethics committee.

But unless Texans address the overall problems of the uninsured and funding for public hospitals, cash-strapped institutions must begin drawing lines, he said.

I find it amazing in the first place that Texas public hospitals were offering cancer treatment -- which isn't cheap -- to impoverished foreigners who are in this country illegally. Absolutely they should quit doing so. Unless one believes that everyone in the world is entitled to free medical treatment in American hospitals, it's morally licit to refuse this kind of treatment to illegal aliens. Resources are not unlimited, and we are morally bound to spend our limited resources on treating our own indigent citizens.

I know, I know, "You call yourself a Christian, you heartless conservative turd." Well, look, you tell me, then, what you say to an impoverished American citizen who is not getting cared for properly because public resources are being claimed by foreigners who are in this country illegally. People like our liberal friend and reader Rawlins Gilliland, who writes:

This is one of the few places I’m inclined to agree with Dreher on the so-called 'illegal immigration' issues. Because, as someone only 5 years ago who faced complete financial ruin when I was in a terrible accident without medical coverage, I learned the hard way that much of the so-called societal safety net I was trying to access was completely used up on 1) unwanted/unplanned pregnancy (the single most preventable of all medical conditions) and 2) those who were accessing medical services but undocumented. This, as a quasi liberal, was enormously disillusioning to me.

Meanwhile, across the street, that immigrant Mexican family's brother arrived from Hidalgo, Mexico to be treated for diabetes complications, all of which he received at Parkland [Dallas County's public hospital -- RD.]. The irony was clear; I, a US citizen who has never even filed for unemployment, was not eligible for subsidized medical care but a man who was at best a guest in this nation was.

I made it through...but I knew that in the case of cancer vs. a traumatic injury (where they cannot turn you away) as I then suffered, I would have to wait in bureaucratic lines behind foreign nationals in hopes of seeking life saving treatment. That opened my eyes to the flip side of having an open-border open heart.