Refugee Rights and Legal Questions

Refugees in the United States face tremendous social pressures while being forced to navigate the health care system with cultural and language barriers confounding the problems of diminished access to services and information. 

One specific risk refugees face is significantly higher rates of communicable illnesses due to the amount of travel and stress associated with relocation, especially combined with the trauma often associated with asylum-seeking.  In order to supplement the health care costs associated with becoming healthy in their new community, refugees are given six to nine months of governmentally-provided health insurance.  While this gesture attempts to satisfy the U.S.’s obligations to provide health care to refugees, it is often insufficient in the face of the red tape refugees are forced to go through to find health care providers willing to care for them with this type of insurance. 

           

A secondary problem is that the period of time they are provided with insurance is often insufficient for completing the vaccine schedules or medication courses in their entirety which is, at best, ineffective for preventing future disease or curing current disease, and, at worst, dangerously promoting mutations of contagious illnesses which produce potentially deadly strains of viruses (in the case of Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis, specifically). 

The dichotomy between the public good and the rising health care costs leave the United States with a choice to make about how they are going to handle the ever-increasing number of refugees who seek asylum within it’s borders.  Balancing the obligations informed by international treaties with the realistic budget constraints of the country poses a challenge to health care for this at-risk population.  

However, questions without a clear answer are ever-present in this largely unexplored area of policy.  To what extent is the U.S. responsible for providing care to refugees?  How can we balance the needs of the communities in which they reside with the needs of the refugees themselves?  How can we focus on preventative health care to save money and increase productivity? How can we prevent communicable illnesses from spreading or mutating due to a lack of access to thorough courses of treatment?  All of these questions come secondarily to whether or not the United States is even obligated to provide care at all; if they are not, is it still within their best interest to do so? The answer seems to be overwhelmingly: yes.

For more information about refugee health, visit the Office of Refugee Resettlement at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/. 

Resources

Basic TB Facts. (2012, March 13). Retrieved September 1, 2015.

Global Tuberculosis (TB). (2014, March 20). Retrieved September 1, 2015.