Doctors and hospitals bill about 3 times more to patients who don’t have insurance (private, medicare, etc..) Insurance cos have negotiated lower rates. Sometimes providers get paid, sometimes they don’t. If they don’t get paid, then they have to increase rates to other patients to make up for the loss.

Correct, emergency rooms cannot turn away patients, so people show up there when they are so sick that they cannot take it anymore.

But doctors’ offices do turn away patients all the time. That’s why there’s no preventive care and something that might have been a small matter turns into an emergency costing thousands of dollars at the emergency room (i.e. the tuberculosis case in the article you mentioned).

If we had universal preventive care, it would cost us a lot less in the long run. Diseases would not be left unchecked and spreading from people to people. Remember, human beings interact, cook food, they have sex, etc…

Also, call any pharmacy, if you have insurance you may pay $10 co-pay for a $100 prescription. But if you don’t have insurance you’ll have to pay $300 for the same prescription. Of course, pharmacies don’t have to give medicine to people who can’t pay.

Once a patient is out of the emergency room, if he is uninsured, he can’t get ongoing treatment. Consider a contagious disease for a minute. He’ll be spreading the disease until he needs to to go the emergency room again. Of course, he can’t pay so the cycle continues. In the mean-time, how many people did he infect? He might be cooking your food at the restaurant, or cleaning your hotel room.

Diseases don’t care if a person is a citizen or not. If we have disease amongst us, we are all worse off.

I might also add that most of the 40 million uninsured are citizens, not illegals.