Doctors in Florida hospitals say they are not refusing new patients airlifted in from Haiti, despite the US military suspending evacuation flights because of a dispute over medical care costs.
Military planes stopped flying critically injured Haitians to Florida on Wednesday, prompting Dr Barth Green, the chairman of neurological surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine to declare on Saturday that patients will die because they can't get sophisticated treatment in Haiti.
"These are the sickest of the sick and we can't care for them either on the ground in Haiti or on the USNS Comfort," a hospital ship off the Haitian coast, Green said in Haiti. "We all agree they need to be medivaced out, but all medivacs by the armed forces have been stopped and Homeland Security will not give us paroles for the
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people.
"We have hospitals waiting to receive them. But at the highest level of the US government, they can't seem to get them out. And this is really not what America is all about."
The controversy surfaced after Governor Charlie Crist wrote to Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, on Wednesday asking for federal help to cover millions of dollars in care that hospitals around the state are providing.
Hospitals 'at capacity'
Crist warned that Florida hospitals were "at capacity" and asked Sebelius to activate the National Disaster Medical System.
On Friday, Major James Lowe, deputy chief of public affairs for the US Transportation Command, told the New York Times that "the places they were being taken, without being specific, were not willing to continue to receive those patients without a different arrangement being worked out by the government to pay for the care".
Not so, said Dr William O'Neill, executive dean of clinical affairs at the Miller School of Medicine.
Although "there hasn't been a well-defined plan to pay for uninsured people ... we are still willing to take people even if we don't know who is going to pay", O'Neill said on Saturday. He said University of Miami doctors in Haiti are not putting injured patients on planes because they have been told they will not be flown to Florida.
He estimated that the treatment for about 50 patients brought to Jackson Memorial Hospital's Ryder Trauma Centre would range from $US50,000 ($A55,890) to $US100,000 ($A111,780), per patient and called the row between the state and the federal government "a little bit of a power contest ... to see who will blink first".
Private aircraft still can carry Florida-bound patients, but they're expensive, Green said.
Private money could be raised to pay
He and a spokesperson for Miami Children's Hospital, which has accepted serious pediatric cases from Haiti, have said they plan to raise private money for their efforts.
On Saturday, US Navy captain Kevin Aandahl, a spokesman for Transportation Command, which handles the air evacuations out of Haiti, confirmed "Transcom has temporarily suspended air medical evacuation flights regarding Haitian nationals. The capability exists to resume those flights at any time.
"It comes down to this: US Transportation Command cannot do an air evacuation medical mission without an accepting medical hospital on the other end. And some states are unwilling to approve patients' entry for follow-on medical care, as I understand it, because of some issues regarding reimbursement.
"Bringing them to the continental United States is half the issue. We've been dealing with individual states saying basically, Don't bring them here'."
But Jaime S. Caldwell, vice-president of the South Florida Hospital and Healthcare Association, also denied the claim that hospitals are not accepting injured Haitians.
Child 'traffickers' charity workers
Haitian police are reportedly holding 10 US citizens on suspicion of trying to take 31 Haitian children out of the quake-devastated country.
Government minister Yves Christallin says police arrested five men and five women with US passports, plus two Haitians
tried to cross into the Dominican Republic with the children on Friday night.
He says two pastors were also involved, one in Haiti and one in Atlanta Georgia.
The minister says it was an abduction - not an adoption - of children aged two months to 12 years.
Christallin said the US citizens did not have the proper documents to take the children out of Haiti, nor letters of
authorisation from their parents.
The children were aged two months to 12 years and had come from different places, he said.
"What is important for us in Haiti is that a child needs to have an authorisation from this ministry to leave the country," he said.
US embassy officials were not immediately available on Saturday evening to comment on the case.
Haitian officials have voiced fears that child traffickers will take advantage of the chaos after Haiti's massive January 12 earthquake to slip out of the country with children in illegal adoption schemes.
There is also concern that legitimate adoption agencies may rush to take earthquake orphans out of Haiti before proper checks have been conducted to confirm their parents have perished.
In an interview with NBC news, a family member of one of those arrested said the Americans were being charged with child trafficking, and that they believed the matter was a misunderstanding over documentation.
The Americans were identified as members of an Idaho-based charity called New Life Children's Refuge.
