E PLURIBUS UNUM: Latin American and Caribbean Immigration, Workers’ Compensation and Medical Tourism

I received an interesting post today from Peter Rousmaniere’s blog, Working Immigrants, which is described as a weblog about the business of immigrant work: employment, compensation, legal protections, education, mobility, and public policy.

Peter’s post, Extraordinary visual of international migration, directs the reader to the website of the International Organization for Migration. What the reader finds there is a map of the world and buttons that allow you to choose between inward and outward migration to and from any country in the world.

By choosing several countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, I was able to create the following table that shows the country of origin of the migrants and the number of migrants from that country to the US.

And here is the key takeaway from the map and the table: The majority of migrants are coming from Mexico, and the total number of migrants to the US from those countries total 20,564,479 million. This number may or may not include undocumented immigrants, and does not include data from The Bahamas, and many of the smaller islands in the Caribbean.

But let’s go back to the total number of migrants. 20.5 million is a pretty large number. That is more than the total population of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia and Phoenix put together, according to the 2010 census.

We can assume that not all of the 20.5 million are able to work or are eligible to receive workers’ compensation benefits, so the number of actual workers out of that 20.5 million is considerably lower. And we can also assume that not all of them will ever file a claim, as I pointed out in an earlier post, Survey says most immigrant workers unaware of Workers’ Compensation: What this means to Workers’ Compensation and Medical Tourism.

Yet, for those who do file a claim, it is likely that some of them will suffer an injury that will eventually require expensive surgery that could be found for a lot less in their home countries or in nearby countries, where language and cultural barriers are not an issue.

In many cases, these countries are less than four hours from most major cities on the east coast of the US, and no more than 8 hours from other cities, depending on how far south one flies.

The question that must be asked is this: If these 20.5 million become permanent residents of the US one day, and have children and grandchildren, wouldn’t it be logical to find a way to provide them with quality medical care at lower prices in their countries of origin, when they are injured on the job, so that their friends and families back home know that they are getting the best care?

And what about those in the workforce who are not from that region? Don’t they deserve the same high quality, low cost medical care when they get injured, especially in a location that provides a restful recovery and maybe a little extra on the side?

If it sounds like I am repeating myself from earlier posts; yes I am, because it needs repeating over and over again until people realize that health care is globalizing, and workers’ compensation, at least the medical side of it, must be a part of that globalization. Not to do so is, well, you know.

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