Thanks for posting Notable…
The forbes article that you mentioned is below.
How American Citizens Finance $18.5 Billion In Health Care For Unauthorized Immigrants
Current federal policy is to prohibit federal tax funding of health care to unauthorized immigrants through either Medicaid or Obamacare. Nevertheless, rough estimates suggest that the nation's 3.9 million uninsured immigrants who are unauthorized likely receive about $4.6 billion in health services paid for by federal taxes, $2.8 billion in health services financed by state and local taxpayers, another $3.0 bankrolled through "cost-shifting" i.e., higher payments by insured patients to cover hospital uncompensated care losses, and roughly $1.5 billion in physician charity care. In addition to these amounts, unauthorized immigrants likely benefit from at least $0.9 billion in implicit federal subsidies due to the tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals and another $5.7 billion in tax expenditures from the employer tax exclusion.
Uninsured Unauthorized Immigrants. According to Pew Research Center, there were 11.3 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2016. Currently, 14% of the uninsured (3.9 million) are unauthorized immigrants who are ineligible for both Medicaid and ACA coverage under federal law. For purposes of discussion, I am going to focus principally on financing health care for unauthorized immigrants who are uninsured since we know that about 70% of care for America's uninsured is uncompensated, meaning that ultimately it is paid for by society in one way or another.
Specifically, in 2013 (the latest available such figures), America's uninsured generated $84.9 billion in uncompensated care costs [Table 2] or $1,257 per person who was ever uninsured that year [Table 1]. Of this:
39% was covered by various federal programs (e.g., disproportionate share payments to hospitals);
23% by state and local governments (e.g., via taxpayer support of state and locally owned hospitals);
12% came in the form of physician charity care covered;
25%–was covered by hospitals (arguably by "cost-shifting" i.e., higher charges to privately insured patients that effectively cross-subsidize care for patients who do not pay full freight etc.). An unknown fraction of this stems from EMTALA–the Emergency Treatment and Active Labor Act–a federal law that requires hospitals to treat emergency patients regardless of their ability to pay. EMTALA is an example of "taxation by regulation" insofar as the same outcome might have been achieved by using tax dollars to pay hospitals to treat such patients voluntarily.
Assuming unauthorized immigrants received a pro rata share of such support (i.e., 14%), they account for the $11.9 billion in uncompensated care costs, financed as follows:
$4.6 billion–federal taxpayers
$2.8 billion–state and local taxpayers
$3.0 billion–hospital charity care/bad debts arguably cost-shifted to private patients
$1.5 billion–physician charity care
https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2018/02/26/how-american-citizens-finance-health-care-for-undocumented-immigrants/?fbclid=IwAR1Slka0EtXS-aQcONFgsQDp7fFxllxrcb_ImDSsQbyQgNm4E_cG93uEgc4#2832d73b12c4