Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz announced Thursday that an internal review uncovered more than $1 billion in Medicaid payments to illegal immigrants across several states, a problem he says the Trump administration is now moving to correct.
“The Democrats have been gaslighting us on this issue of Medicaid funds going to illegal immigrants for quite a while,” Oz said on “Fox & Friends.”
Healthcare for illegal immigrants has been a major issue prolonging the latest government shutdown, which is now entering its third week. Republicans accuse Democrats of allowing federal health dollars to go to illegal immigrants while standing in the way of efforts to cut government waste.
Oz said his agency’s investigation into the topic is “just getting started” and the latest figure covers only a few states.
“If you live in Texas or Florida, and you’re paying U.S. federal taxes – most people do – your money is being diverted to places like California who have robust benefits for illegal immigrants,” he said.
“Now we’re investigating it, and we’re [going to] continue to track this across the country.”
Democrats have refused to budge on reopening the government, saying they won’t vote for a funding bill unless it includes an extension of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire in 2025. They argue that not acting before the start of open enrollment in November could leave millions of Americans facing higher premiums. --->READ MORE HERE
 |
| Photo by GUILLERMO ARIAS/AFP via Getty Images |
While legacy media fact checkers have scrambled to dismantle the GOP argument that Democrats shut down the government over subsidized healthcare for illegals, experts and the federal government make clear that Republicans have a point.
Major news outlets are framing GOP accusations that Democrats are shutting down the government to give illegal migrants subsidized healthcare as false, arguing that only lawfully present foreign nationals are able to obtain such benefits. However, a large number of foreign nationals — such those paroled into the country — are both eligible for subsidized care and considered to be illegally present by the federal government and experts.
“We see these fact checkers come out saying ‘false, false, false’ everywhere, but there’s no formal definition of illegal alien anywhere, right?” Jason Richwine, a resident scholar for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), said to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “So it’s a perfectly defensible opinion — and it’s an opinion that I share — that people with these sort of limited protections from deportation, like Temporary Protected Status, DACA, humanitarian parole, that they are still illegal aliens.”
“That’s my opinion, and it also happens to be the way those illegals are counted,” Richwine continued. “When groups like, not just the Center for Immigration Studies, but the Department of Homeland Security and Pew [Research Center] and the Migration Policy Institute, when they do their official counts of how many illegal immigrants there are, [they include] people with those statuses as illegal, and so it’s perfectly reasonable for Republicans to do that too.”
‘Semantic Debate’
“This is false,” deemed an Associated Press fact check of the claim that “Democrats shut down the government because they want to give free health care to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally.”
While acknowledging that hospitals receive some Medicaid reimbursements for emergency care that can go toward undocumented migrants, the AP definitively claimed that “immigrants in the U.S. illegally are not eligible for any federal health care programs, including insurance provided through the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid.”
On the question of “can ‘illegal immigrants’ get federally funded health care?” a USA Today article also answered no. “Democrats want to restore Medicaid and marketplace access to where they were at the start of the summer, to a time when millions more Americans, and some lawful immigrants, could qualify,” USA Today states.
NPR and CNN also issued fact checks, with both outlets declaring it false to claim that Democrats are pushing to give healthcare benefits to illegal migrants.
Both the AP and USA Today fact checks mention that “lawfully present” immigrants are capable of accessing Medicaid and Obamacare exchanges — access that would be restored in the Democrats’ plan. However, both articles fail to mention that there are categories of foreign nationals that are eligible for federal healthcare subsidies and still considered to be unlawfully present by the federal government.
Foreign nationals paroled into the U.S. are considered to be unauthorized immigrants by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Beneficiaries of Protected Status (TPS) are also considered to be illegal under DHS. Both categories are also considered to be among the unauthorized population by the non-partisan Pew Research Center. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment