California Democrats have ramped up their push to extend health benefits to in-staters who immigrated unlawfully.
High-stakes legislation
Sacramento Democrats have advanced a piece of legislation, authored by State Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, that would grant access to Affordable Care Act benefits to unlawful immigrants. SB4, which would open up Medi-Cal enrollment, cleared the Assembly Health Committee on a party line vote, drawing a few dozen opponents at the bill’s hearing.
According to Lara’s website, some “three to four million people in the state will remain uninsured in spite of ACA, and almost a million of those will be undocumented residents eligible for coverage, save for their legal status.”
Last month, the state Senate voted to clear the bill, also known as the Health For All Act, with Lara describing the scheme as “a transformational and decisive step forward on the path to achieving health for all,” according to MSNBC. But Gov. Jerry Brown’s office already intervened once to scale back Democrats’ ambitions.
“The initial bill, which would have allowed all undocumented immigrants to sign up via Medi-Cal, was pared down after it was estimated to cost up to $740 million a year, a price tag Brown said was unacceptable. The governor has not indicated whether or not he’ll sign off on the latest legislation.”
Nevertheless, as Politico reported, Brown did sign off on spending “millions in state dollars to provide health care to undocumented children, mirroring similar efforts in a handful of other liberal states.”
Covered California, the state-run health care exchange, has become an Obamacare keystone, although its second-year enrollment numbers have fallen short of goals. Continued tension between Gov. Brown and state Democrats on the costs of expanding coverage could pose problems for the party on a national level. “Republicans never trusted Democrats’ repeated assurances while the law was being drafted that the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t cover undocumented immigrants,” Politico noted. “That built up to Rep. Joe Wilson’s infamous ‘You lie!’ moment, when the South Carolina Republican interrupted President Barack Obama’s 2009 health care address to Congress.”
Walking the line
In some parts of the state, strategies for expanding benefits have had to adapt to changing political circumstances. Although state Democrats at the municipal level have long adopted a generous attitude, a new expansion of health funding stopped short of including the unlawfully present.
The San Francisco Department of Health was recently put in charge of administering a new effort under its so-called City Option initiative, which makes it easier for workers to buy insurance through Covered California. Previously, beneficiaries were eligible for reimbursements supplied by the city, whereas, under the new effort, San Francisco will directly subsidize purchases made through the state exchange. “The new subsidies will not benefit immigrants living in San Francisco who are in the U.S. illegally,” however, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
As the Chronicle added, illegally present immigrants have already received some favor under municipal law: “They are still eligible to receive health care services through the city’s Healthy San Francisco program.”
In the city, illegal immigration has become a freshly charged issue in the wake of a shooting that made national news, eliciting comments from Republican presidential candidates. While Donald Trump tied the killing to the city’s so-called “sanctuary” status, Jeb Bush, on a recent visit reported by the Los Angeles Times, said it was inappropriate to “prey on that fear,” suggesting “it’s not a winning message either.”
If San Francisco’s decision not to extend the new subsidy to unlawful immigrants reflected unease on the left, Bush’s remarks suggested something similar on the right. “I think candidates ought to lay out proposals to solve problems rather than basically prey on legitimate fears and concerns,” he said, trying to strike a moderate tone.
(Originally posted on CalWatchdog.)
At a time when payments to providers of Medi-Cal services are being cut
the Legislature is seeking to increase the load of available users?! Are idiots running the government? Perhaps it should be determined by a suit
if the Legislature is enabled to spend taxpayer funds for non-taxpayers who have entered the state illegally.
Hell, why don’t the idiots in Sacramento offer healthcare to the world? This is insane and will simply cause these idiots to next call for another tax increase.
Meanwhile, real Calif. residents, who have lived here for decades, go without the same preferential care. Lara, Brown and their legislative cronies are buying up votes this way and they don’t even have the decency to be ashamed. Voters, get the fools out of Sacramento!
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Unfortunately people will not vote them out because people always vote for self interest. In this case that means as long as the politicians keep giving things away the people will keep voting for them. Mainly because the people in general are to stupid to realize it all has to be paid for and the only place the money can come from is the people.
INVADING CRIMINALS.. please they are NOT IMMIGRANTS.. They are INVADING CRIMINALS who steal our taxes, education, housing, jobs and now MEDICAL. CALL YOUR POLITICIANS
This puts an unreasonable burden on the CITIZENS of California. The way things are going with the liberal government the next proposal will insure everyone in California and Mexico, on the basis that they need health care to. Is it possible that California could go broke?
What all you complainers need to do is what I do, try to vote these dummies out of office. Quit re-electing the same idiots. If you don’t vote for an incumbent then they will be gone, anything would be better that what we got from the Governor on down!
No! What we ALL need to do is to leave.
Ricardo Lara, Senator from Bell Gardens, and Los Pinos.
What part of illegal do our stupid politicians NOT understand???????
The legal word for them is ILLEGAL ALIENS.