Imagine going to hospital in an emergency, only to wake up in a different country.  That’s the horror facing more and more people who went to live in America for a better life, only to be rejected by the broken healthcare system.

The growing phenomenon recently claimed 69-year old New Jersey resident Wladyslaw Haniszewski, who had lived and worked in the US for three decades.  His friend Jerzy Jedra took the elderly man to hospital earlier this month and it was there that he suffered a stroke.

“This is a very good man who I saw on a daily basis for some 12 years,” said Jedra.

But when Haniszewski fell into a coma he awoke to find himself in his native country of Poland.  He was not awake to give his consent to essentially being deported.

The reason for this?  No health insurance.  Uninsured immigrants are increasingly deported by US hospitals that do not want to get stuck paying for their treatment, with the approval of the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).  It’s cheaper to fly these people to their former homes than to give them long-term treatment.

The hospital claimed it followed the law, but “It’s an incredibly disturbing case,” said Lori Nessel, director of the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall University School of Law. “This kind of action seems clearly illegal and also not ethical, but it’s hard to bring a legal action.”

A Seton Hall study says US hospitals have sent or tried to send more than 800 immigrants back to their origin countries since 2006. 

These include:

  • A nineteen-year-old girl who died shortly after being wheeled out of a hospital back entrance typically used for garbage disposal and transferred to Mexico.
  • A car accident victim who died shortly after being left on the tarmac at an airport in Guatemala. 
  • And a young man with catastrophic brain injury who remains bed-ridden and suffering from constant seizures after being forcibly deported to his elderly mother’s hilltop home in Guatemala.

Haniszewski’s situation is particularly cruel, because he is estranged from his only family remaining in Poland.