Via Demi-Semi Blog:

Immigrant rights and public health groups are urgently trying to raise public opposition to a bill in the U.S. House of Representatives, HR 3722, cynically titled the "Undocumented Alien Emergency Medical Assistance Amendments of 2004." The bill would provide a billion dollars to pay hospitals for care of undocumented immigrants, but at a ghastly moral price: it would force hospitals that accept federal money for the care of an "undocumented alien" patient under the new Medicare bill to demand information about the patient's citizenship status.

For "undocumented aliens" (no word on how hospitals are to identify this group in the first place) the bill would tell hospitals to obtain further personal information plus fingerprints or other "identifiers," and would then expect them to denounce their own patients to the immigration authorities. Per the advocacy groups' analyses, the bill would cause people who lack proper papers to avoid medical care and would put doctors under pressure to violate basic requirements of medical ethics.