by Erick Galindo
The health care debate has become a shoving match, and immigrants, legal and otherwise, are being pushed the hardest.
President Obama’s admission that immigration reform will have to wait until next year further fueled fears that, while one-f fth of the nation’s 45 million uninsured are immigrants, health reform benefits will not cover them.
“We are critically concerned,” Jennifer Ng’andu, deputy director of the Health Policy Project for the National Council de La Raza, told Weekly Report. “There are no current provisions extending public benefits to undocumented immigrants, and now legal immigrants are in danger of losing some benefits.”
Obama told Hispanic Link and nine other members of the Hispanic media invited to a “roundtable” discussion on Hispanic-related matters that the animosity around both issues will be tough to overcome at the present time.
“I think that, with respect to the debate that’s taking place around health care reform now, it is not going to be possible to provide coverage for undocumented workers,” Obama said.
Additionally, he noted that health coverage had already been extended to 11 million children includ:ing undocumented ones.
“That was a fight that had been out there for a decade. It was a huge accomplishment,” he said.
A weeks-long battle for public support of proposed reform has intensified as members of Congress have faced tough crowds peppered with hostile shouting and pushing matches at “town hall” meetings across the country.
Many detractors have made it clear they do not like “Obama’s plan” because he is a “socialist.” Encouraged by such groups as the U,S. Chamber of Commerce’ Libertarian political party and rabidly right-wing talk radio hosts, the outrage and outbursts at these meetings are part of an opposition strategy to disrupt the administration’s message Comprehensive care supporters have reacted by sending their own members to counter.
Immigration has been thrown into the fray is nativist groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform lobby vigorously for exclusion of “illegal aliens.”
Including them under the plan is unwarranted and would add billions to the price tag,’ ‘said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. “In Pennsylvania and all across the nation the public is understandably upset about the staggering costs of illegal immigration and adamantly oppose providing a full range of health benefits to illegal aliens.”
NCLR’s Ng’andu says the notion that immigrants’ legal or otherwise do not pay taxes is incorrect.
“Immigrants pay taxes like everyone else’” he added. “Everyone should be integrated and everyone should share in the responsibility.”
These hot-button issues intersect beyond 160C Pennsylvania Ave.
While Massachusetts’s Commonwealth Care program has become a reform model, the state legislature voted last month to stop covering documented immigrants with fewer than five years on their green card— all 30~000 of them.
Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter who switched registration from Republican to Democrat earlier this year’ has said he will not support health legislation that covers undocumented immigrants.
In the past Specter has supported path-to-citizenship legislation’ but assured a rowdy crowd at an Aug. 12 town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pennsylvania., that “none of the bills in Congress would provide health insurance to illegal immigrants.”
In California, the health care and immigration debates have always been intertwined.
In February, several counties, including heavily Latino Sacramento County, began to cut non-emergency care to the undocumented citing financial restraints.
The pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center charges that the issue is being used “as a way to jam a stick into the wheels of impending reform.”
Obama reacted, “When it comes to legal immigrants, then my attitude is that’ in the same way the Children’s Health Insurance Program made sense’ we should try to provide help for those who are here legally.
“We don’t want children, or their parents for that matter, to be on a playground with tuberculosis and not have access to any health care services. Hispanic Link.
