We all know that Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) yelled “You lie!” when President Obama said during a speech to a joint session of Congress that healthcare reform wouldn’t cover illegal immigrants.
It was an ugly episode, but it raises two important questions.
1. Was Obama indeed lying?
The answer is no. Obama’s healthcare reform package doesn’t cover illegal immigrants. In fact, the White House said last week that illegal immigrants wouldn’t be allowed to buy coverage through a health insurance exchange even if they pay for it themselves.
They would still be able to buy insurance directly from private plans in the individual insurance market; unfortunately, that market is going to be much smaller with the advent of exchanges. Note: Of the nation’s 12 million or so illegal immigrants (estimates vary), nearly half have health insurance.
2. Should we be offering coverage to illegal immigrants (or legal immigrants for that matter)?
The answer is yes. Since immigrants (illegal or otherwise) tend to be young and healthy, they would probably improve the insurance risk pool and their premium dollars would help subsidize reform. So at the very least they should be allowed to buy coverage through an insurance exchange.
But the issue is bigger than that. If healthcare is a right — and I think it is — then how do you provide care to one human being living and working in your country but deny it to another?
It is true that emergency rooms are required to provide care to the uninsured — including illegal immigrants. But that’s a terribly inefficient way of delivering healthcare. And it turns out that immigrants in general are low utilizers of E.R. services, compared to U.S. citizens.
Yes, covering illegal immigrants would cost money and is a political minefield. But at some point we have to ask ourselves what are we trying to achieve with healthcare reform: coverage for everyone holding the right piece of paper or coverage for everyone living and working in America?
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Thank you for this common sense testimony on why illegal immigrants SHOULD BE ABLE to purchase health insurance. It maybe a “political minefield” but it makes sense to me for a leader to step up to the plate to defend it.
This is a relatively simple logic problem. The first question you have to ask is are illegal immigrants part of the population of the United States. The answer is yes if they are counted in the census report. If they are not counted, they are not part of the population and hence should not be considered in any factor that is based on computational statistics from population estimates.
I fully support the Hispanic population in their ability to immigrate into the United States. However this should be based on the same legal standards that someone from the Ukraine or New Zealand should have to comply with. Just because they have a shared border with the United States does not give them a special privilege to become US citizens or to work in the United States illegally.
There is a disproportionate burden imposed on areas of the United States that share the border with Mexico and that is not being compensated by the federal government. California, Arizona and Texas bear the vast majority of the economic impact of caring for the health conditions of this “healthy” population of individuals.
I think it is absolutely true that most of these people are younger, and in general have less true medical problems. They will however, represent a much larger percentage of patients suffering from deaths requiring hospitalization for H1N1 influenza due to rid the risk factor of obesity.
Additionally, they have a significant cost to the health care system in Los Angeles County, Orange County, and San Diego County in California involving the delivery of children from illegal immigrants across the border and have their children which automatically become US citizens. So now not only do we have to absorb the costs of the labor and delivery but we also have to absorb the cost of a child who automatically becomes a US citizen and goes on the welfare payroll for California. This is costing the state of California more than $11 billion a year of which we do not have the resources to cover. This means increased taxation to US citizens to cover the cost of people who are illegally here. I don’t know where the fairness in this exists.
I do not know a solution to this problem. On the other hand I am very upset that we cannot afford to fund the universities in the state of California to educate the next generation of scientists, philosophers, and engineers while the funds going to the educational system drop in order to fund the health-care costs of people who are illegally in the country. I do not see the justice in this.
I hope that someone can respond to this with some enlightenment as to how this represents equity for all citizens of the United States.