Jim Kolbe: “I come to rise in opposition to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Colorado. Once again, what we are looking at…”

“I come to rise in opposition to the amendment offered by the gentleman from Colorado. Once again, what we are looking at here is something that tries to deal with the symptoms of illegal immigration. It does not actually deal with the problem that we have of illegal immigration. But in this case we are really not talking about going after illegal immigrants at all. We are going after hospitals. We are going after health care providers. We are going after the people that are providing the health care, that are providing emergency services for these people, and we are saying we are going to punish those particular people. This is an antihospital amendment. There is no other way to describe it. It is just an antihospital amendment. If this amendment passes, we are punishing the overburdened and undercompensated hospitals, which I happen to have a lot of them in my district because we have a lot of the illegal immigration in Arizona. And so the costs in Arizona are tremendous. This is targeted directly against the hospitals in places like Arizona and along the border there. If the Federal Government mandates that hospitals treat those that are brought to their doors, and they do, then the problem is you need to reform that law, EMTALA as it is called. If you want to deal with the problem, reform that.”