An H1 programmer in New Jersey narrowly survived a car accident but now languishes in a hospital, unable to receive the medical care he requires.
Friends and supporters of Tejas Parmar, a programmer with SysMind, say he's in urgent need of rehabilitation after sustaining fractures in his neck region and paralysis of the lower body.
The incident occurred March 24, while Parmar was driving home from work. His car hit a highway median outside New Brunswick, New Jersey, rolled over several times and came to rest on the opposite side of the highway.
Parmar stayed for 35 days in an intensive care unit, but with his current hospital working hard to discharge him and rehab centers refusing to admit him, his future remains uncertain and showcases the insurance dilemma of short-term immigrants in the US.
"He's been in a state of limbo," said Hemant Wadhwani, of the Asian American Political Coalition. "He doesn't know how much longer he's going to be in there."
According to Wadhwani and others, Parmar, 25, requires considerable rehabilitation of his spinal chord. Currently, he's at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital, and is seeking admission to a rehab center such as Kessler Memorial Hospital, in Hammonton, New Jersey, or JFK Medical Center, in Edison.
However, neither institute has been willing to take him in. His car insurance afforded him $250,000 in medical care, all of which was exhausted after his time in ICU. If Parmar had a green card, or were an American citizen, his required rehabilitation would've been funded by Social Security, something H1 holders are denied.
According to New Jersey State Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula, neither JFK nor Kessler are willing to incur the likely cost of Parmar's rehabilitation.
"The law in New Jersey is that if someone's on your premises, you can't just throw him out without curing him," said Chivukula, who has been trying to negotiate a solution to the matter. "It's a gamble and they don't want to take a chance... If you have to keep him longer than three months, the cost of treatment could be phenomenal. It's about dollars."
In the absence of any relatives in this country, a group of Parmar's friends have come together and proposed to both rehab centers that he be admitted for 60 days, the maximum that his health plan will cover. After that, they said, they guarantee that they would have him taken back to India. Currently, he's incapable of making the trip.
"We just want him to go to treatment for a month or two months," said Parmar's friend Kritee, a doctoral student at Rutgers. "Otherwise, his whole life is jeopardized."
The situation, she said, points to an extreme double standard in America's health care system.
"If [other] short-term immigrants come here, is this what they will face if they get injured?" she asked.