Yes, ObamaCare will likely cover illegal aliens

Media fact-checkers have caught Obama telling several falsehoods about his health-care proposals. But they have let him get away with other false claims, such as his claim that ObamaCare would not cover illegal aliens. As John Rosenberg, an expert on discrimination law, explains, the health-care legislation backed by Obama would indeed likely cover illegal aliens.

As commentators at National Review and other publications have noted, while a House health-care bill backed by Obama purports to exclude exclude illegal aliens from receiving certain taxpayer-funded subsidies, it effectively includes them, since it blocks any way of determining whether or not recipients of government health insurance are in the country legally. This is because liberal lawmakers deliberately blocked conservative attempts to require verification that recipients of federally-subsidized health insurance are citizens or in the country legally. 

One of the “Blue Dog” Democrats who voted for the bill in committee now admits that it does cover illegal aliens.

As syndicated columnist Jay Ambrose notes, “Democrats want to make it impossible to find out if an applicant for benefits is here illegally or not, despite specific wording in bills saying they don’t qualify. Republicans have tried on a number of occasions to include amendments requiring more than what Democrats want — just writing down a Social Security number that will never be checked — and the answer is, oh my, this is an invasion of privacy. . . .It’s an invasion of privacy to find out whether someone is or is not a citizen and therefore eligible for something taxpayers are providing? What blather. All of us have to produce IDs of one kind or another on a host of different occasions, from driver’s licenses, to passports, to birth certificates. . . ‘Saying that illegal immigrants cannot benefit while at the same time blocking verification is akin to passing a law that sets the legal drinking age at 21 years and then preventing bars from checking a patron’s identification,’ writes Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in an op-ed piece in The Washington Times, and it seems to me that about says it.”

Covering illegal aliens might be acceptable if illegal aliens also had the same responsibilities as citizens. But they don’t. Illegal aliens are exempt from the taxes and penalties contained in ObamaCare, even though they are effectively able to access its benefits due to the lack of eligibility verification safeguards. Illegal aliens should not receive preference.

Yet the Congressional Hispanic Caucus pushed to have illegal aliens benefit from ObamaCare.

Illegal aliens are not the biggest health care issue. But it does shed light on the media’s willingness to gullibly accept many of Obama’s claims at face value. Some media fact-checkers have claimed that ObamaCare won’t cover illegal aliens simply because Obama says so.

But Obama’s credibility is undermined by his long line of broken promises, such as his pledge to enact a “net spending cut,” which he broke through budgets that will explode the national debt through $9.3 trillion in massively increased deficit spending.

Obama’s own advisors have called into question his claims about how ObamaCare will supposedly let you keep your health coverage while cutting costs.

“ObamaCare is all about rationing,” says one of Obama’s own advisers, Martin Feldstein. Feldstein earlier noted that Obama’s health-care plan would harm people with insurance, and massively raise taxes.

ObamaCare is penny-wise and pound-foolish, cutting reimbursement for crucial things like anesthesia to ridiculously low levels (and thus aggravating a shortage of anesthesiologists and doctors), even while increasing spending on wasteful frills.

Legal experts and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights have questioned the constitutionality of major provisions of ObamaCare.

Fact-checkers say Obama is lying about health-care.

Feldstein, a Harvard professor, warns that “For the 85 percent of Americans who already have health insurance, the Obama health plan is bad news. It means higher taxes, less health care and no protection if they lose their current insurance because of unemployment or early retirement.” Obama’s plan would “cost more than $1 trillion,” and raise the top federal “income-tax rate from 35 percent today to more than 45 percent,” he notes.

As CNN earlier noted, Obama’s plan would take away “5 freedoms,” including the freedom to choose your doctors, the freedom to choose what’s in your plan, the freedom to keep your existing plan, the freedom to be rewarded for healthy living, and the freedom to choose high-deductible coverage.

Earlier, we described how Obama’s health-care plan would destroy many affordable health-care plans, raise taxes on the middle class, and break Obama’s campaign promises, as well as his recent pledge that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”

Most other countries do not provide national health insurance for illegal immigrants.