Obama's Misdirection on Illegal Immigrant Health Insurance

Obama has been making speeches in which he claims that the Democrat Congress's health insurance reform bills are being misrepresented. He has claimed over and over that if you like your present health insurance plan, you can keep it. This is true, but for many, it is only true for a very short time span and then it is blatantly false. Another of his common claims of misrepresentation is stated this way:

Let’s start with the false claim that illegal immigrants will get health insurance under reform. That’s not true. Illegal immigrants would not be covered.

Indeed, Section 246 of the House bill, HR 3200, says

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

As pointed out by Ernest Istook, a Distinguished Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, on Human Events.com, this is a magician's misdirection feat. The bill will do the following for illegal immigrants:

• They will receive expanded Medicaid benefits.
• Current law allows illegal aliens emergency medical care through Medicaid, but few states require proof of legal residence, so illegals easily get non-emergency Medicaid. Democrats voted down Republican efforts to close this no-verification path by requiring verification of legal residence in the HR 3200 bill and in the Senate bill.
  

So, illegal aliens will be allowed to do what they do with respect to Food Stamps. Federal regulations require the notification of immigration authorities if an illegal alien is found in a household applying for Food Stamps. The Clinton administration put out an Interagency Notice "that unless a person has already had a hearing and been formally determined to be an illegal immigrant, no government agency really 'knows' that they are illegal -- so they need not be turned in."

So, Obama attempts to use the magician's trick of misdirection to make us think that illegal immigrants will not be provided additional health care by the Democrat health insurance bills under consideration and he is widely backed up in the media. In fact, given that the government commonly calls Medicaid and Medicare health "insurance", he has lied to us in the quoted statement above. What the media say is generally that the claims that illegal immigrants will get added insurance coverage are false claims. But, by the customary technique of the Democrat administrations, illegal immigrants surely will get additional health insurance coverage under the Democrat health reform bills. It is clear that Obama lied in the opening statement above.

This approach to allowing the unallowable is common for Democrats. In 1937, the FDR administration and the Supreme Court, under court packing threats, decided that union violence was just right for America. They did not say union violence was fine. No, they just said that any union violence would be ignored by law enforcement agencies. In this way, a favored group is not offended even though there are many laws requiring that the government protect its citizens from violent acts.

Another instance of this same method was seen recently when Obama's Justice Department refused to prosecute the two Black Panthers who were armed and making intimidating moves against voters during the last presidential election in Philadelphia.

Any increased government involvement in health care will result in more health care spending for illegal aliens, because government refuses to recognize that illegal aliens are illegal. The Democrats have already made it very clear that this is their intention by voting down the Republican proposals for legal residence verification.