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Bilingual Professionals:
Promote the importance of, and accept, diversity in order to attract bilingual professionals who can add to the workforce, particularly in healthcare.
Rationale: Hospitals will provide healthcare to patients presented at facilities regardless of immigration status. Without a diverse workforce to serve the medically-needy population, it is more costly to communicate; is less time efficient to address a patient's care; and less productive healthcare services are provided to both legal and illegal patients.
Health Education and Disease Prevention: Strengthen the primary care initiatives of the local healthcare community, especially the Mecklenburg County Health Department, for both legal and illegal immigrants by adding more human resources and services.
Rationale: Charlotte and many cities across the country have a young immigrant population. Chronic disease (and acute healthcare conditions) will expand/proliferate into the local population as immigrants age and acculturate into the local community/society. Promoting primary health care and education and disease prevention at a young age will help contain healthcare costs. Generally, the Mexican population in America comes to the country healthy, but their health declines as they acculturate, raising the need for more primary care to avoid eventual chronic or acute care for this population. The increased levels of acute healthcare conditions will lead to increased (and unreimbursed) hospital costs. Outpatient services are typically $4 - $7 to $1 less costly than Inpatient hospital services.
Uninsured: Address, in a substantive manner, the issues of the lack of health insurance and lack of government support for the uninsured working poor, of which the immigrant population is a significant part.
Rationale: Families in the working poor category will continue to grow through both immigration and job loss. Medical Home Care and Outpatient Care are less costly than the acute care (emergency room) environments that many of the uninsured are presently using. Emergency room utilization rates are rising and subsequently so are the wait times at emergency rooms.
Communicable Diseases:
All immigration actions or policies should include provisions to guard against communicable diseases and provide access to preventive care services for the immigrant population.
Rationale: The Charlotte-Mecklenburg and U.S. population at-large is at risk of a public health crisis, due to lack of knowledge of health status and vaccination history of immigrant population. By providing preventive services, such as inoculations, and verifying immunization documents at schools, the risk is less costly than having to treat a communicable disease and would help reduce a community health outbreak scenario.
