Thread: Walters: Immigration debate linked to health care

Walters: Immigration debate linked to health care

Scripps Howard News Service
December 07, 2009
DAN WALTERS, Sacramento Bee

One of the red-hot aspects of the very heated political debate over a national health insurance system is whether millions of illegal immigrants -- a quarter of whom live in California -- will be included or excluded.

And to California's deficit-plagued budget, it's not merely an ideological squabble. If a health coverage agreement can be reached, inclusion or exclusion of illegal immigrants from benefits could have multibillion-dollar effects on the budget.

It's estimated that there are 12 million illegal immigrants, most of them from Latin America, in the United States. Roughly 3 million of them reside in California. Some receive health coverage through employers, about 800,000 receive state health care of some kind, and others are treated in emergency rooms and public clinics, whose costs often hit taxpayers.

Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., infamously shouted "you lie" to President Barack Obama when he told Congress that federal health care "would not apply to those who are here illegally," thus triggering furious maneuvering in Congress and linking the heated health care issue to the even hotter immigration issue.

Both Democratic versions purport to deny, or at least restrict, federal benefits to illegal immigrants. But conservative critics contend that a mandate on employers to provide health coverage would indirectly provide benefits to illegal workers.

The White House persuaded the Senate to ban illegal immigrants from receiving federal health subsidies or participating in a federally sponsored insurance purchasing pool with their own money. The House version, however, would allow illegal immigrants to participate in the pool.

Meanwhile, the congressional Latino caucus, including many Californians, and Latino rights groups are demanding that immigration status be disconnected from health care. "We feel that our community is not being fully represented in the conversation and need to be more aggressively represented," Lillian Rodriguez Lopez, president of the Hispanic Federation, told the Washington Post.

The debate affects approximately 2 million illegal immigrants in California who lack health insurance. State officials have conducted no detailed studies of the impact because the bills themselves are constantly changing. It appears, however, that the state budget would benefit should illegal immigrants be included, but would incur even higher costs if they are excluded -- largely because it's virtually certain that national health care would expand eligibility for Medi-Cal, the program now serving about 7 million low-income Californians, by raising income limits.

By one congressional analysis, increased eligibility would cost California an additional $1.4 billion a year. That's a heavy blow on a budget that's already billions of dollars out of balance, in part because of rising Medi-Cal costs, now about $14 billion a year.

E-mail Dan Walters at dwalters@sacbee.com.

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Even if healthcare legislation was passed that specifically and authentically prohibited federally subsidized care for illegal aliens this could all become moot if an Amnesty bill were passed. The formerly illegal would become legal---and this is the intent of the Obama administration. Many of the newly legalized aliens would probably still be in lower paying jobs that would be less likely to offer health coverage. This is even more reason to keep the public option out of any bill.