Florida Spends $660M on Healthcare for Undocumented Immigrants Amid New Legal Status Checks

The state of Florida has collected new data that shows that Illegal Immigrants cost its healthcare system $660,000,000 in 2024.

The Florida Agency for Health Care Administration announced Tuesday the most recent update to the Hospital patient immigration status dashboard, which tracks the number of emergency room and hospital visits based upon a patient’s immigration status.

Data for 2024 shows that 67.700 visits to emergency rooms were by patients who entered the country illegally, resulting in approximately $76.6 million in Medicaid payments.

The state has paid for nearly $660,000,000 worth of medical care to illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Kim Smoak, AHCA Deputy Secretary, said: “The Agency is committed to fulfilling Governor Desantis’s commitments to protect taxpayer dollars against being spent on individuals not legally present in the United States.”

“The data shows that Florida’s health care system is being strained by the financial burden of Illegal Immigration. Our goal is to continue to work to make sure that healthcare providers and hospitals provide quality care to U.S. citizens.”

Miami-Dade County is the county that pays the most, according to the AHCA Dashboard. It has paid over $282 million to cover the costs of health care for illegal immigrants by 2024.

Orange County, which includes Orlando, was at $38 million, while Duval County, which includes Jacksonville, was at $ 34 million. Many counties in the Big Bend area, including those around Jacksonville, have no hospitals and, therefore, have not reported any hospital costs.

Several major hospitals reported that a high proportion of their ER patients refused to give a straight answer when asked about citizenship.

According to the Tallahassee Democrat, nearly two-thirds of Tampa General Hospital Spring Hill patients declined to respond in the first quarter of 2024. The newspaper reported that 96% of the 36,000 ER visitors at Flagler Hospital near St. Augustine declined to answer the question about citizenship.

Governor. As part of the crackdown on illegal immigrants in Florida, Ron DeSantis passed a bill that asked patients who were accepted by Medicaid hospitals an immigration-related question. Politico reports that, while they were not required to respond, this law led to a decline of 54% in Medicaid payments to the state’s program to provide medical aid to undocumented migrants.

Last year, $500 million was spent by hospitals on “people that shouldn’t be in the United States,” according to State Rep. Randy Fine (R-Melbourne), who sponsored the immigration package that led them to catalog such data.

He told WLRN, “That is half a million dollars that has been stolen from Floridians.”

In January, Donald Trump removed the hospitals from a listing of locations immune to ICE activities.