In order to garner the votes of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and to shore up support for his proposed health insurance reform from the National Council of La Raza and other Hispanic groups, President Obama told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute last week that he would make health insurance available to everyone who is legally in the United States and that he would work to legalize illegal aliens by passing comprehensive immigration reform (amnesty).
Currently foreign nationals who are legally in the U.S. are ineligible for any public benefits, including publicly funded health care with very limited exceptions, for five years after entry. During those five years, new immigrants and their sponsors are responsible for ensuring that they are not burdens on society and that the United States is not importing welfare recipients.
However, under the President's integrated health insurance and comprehensive immigration (amnesty) reform plans, all legal permanent residents in the United States would be immediately eligible for a full range of public assistance programs including government-provided and/or -subsidized health insurance.
Under these integrated plans, health insurance reform would pass and it would include all foreign nationals legally in the United States. Then a short time later, millions of illegal aliens would be immediately legalized when the President's "comprehensive immigration reform" plan passes. Thus, the number of uninsured people benefiting from expanded health insurance coverage jumps from the 30 million that the President said would be covered during his joint address to Congress back to the 46 million that he used prior to that address.
Based on the President's clearly stated intention to provide health insurance for millions of legal and illegal aliens, honesty requires that the cost estimates of the proposed health care bills include the full cost of covering all legal permanent residents and all illegal aliens currently in the United States. This would substantially increase the price tag.
President Obama will undoubtedly argue that comprehensive immigration reform is not amnesty and he will require illegal aliens to pay a fine to the government as a penalty for illegally entering the United States. However, he would sacrifice the millions of American men, women, and children who are victims of illegal-alien document fraud and identity theft by granting full amnesty from these serious felonies to the estimated 75 percent of illegal aliens (9 million people) who routinely commit document fraud and/or identity theft in order to illegally obtain jobs.
In addition, the President's integrated health insurance and comprehensive immigration reform plans would require taxpayers, including the victims of illegal-alien-driven identity theft, to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for subsidized health insurance for illegal aliens benefiting from amnesty. The President would likely make no provision for compensating the victims of the illegal aliens' identity-related crimes and would leave millions of American men, women, and children to recover their identities at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars from their own pockets.
It is clear that the Administration's integrated, comprehensive health insurance and immigration reform plans place the interest of at least nine million illegal-alien identity thieves ahead of the millions of innocent American men, women, and children that the president took an oath to defend and to protect. This goes beyond being mean-spirited. It is downright cruel.