Study: Immigrants provide $115B subsidy to Medicare
They use fewer services than Americans do
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 past 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.”
Immigrant subsidy
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.[/quote]
The immigrants who pay into Medicare would likely be the legal ones who tend to be more highly-skilled (they admitted in the paper that they couldn’t track Medicare contributions by illegal immigrants who use fake SSNs). They are also often here on work visas of some sort, so would be less likely to use Medicare benefits, naturally.
This study doesn’t show the total public costs vs. benefits of **illegal** immigration, or legal immigration of low-skilled workers. Of course, it would be difficult to quantify since the PTB have made it difficult to document the costs of illegal immigration (you’re not allowed to ask about resident status, for instance, when enrolling students for school, etc.).
