l********n
发帖数: 833 | 1 其实，反对CIR还有一个重磅武器就是obamacare,当年巴马信誓旦旦说obamacare不包括
非法移民，因为他打算直接让让非移合法化。所以即使边境安全争议解决了，还有医保
问题。下面是华盛顿邮报周日的原文。地下室索男花了成千上万去办绿卡，交税。居然
有华裔利钵肉说强制让非法移民买保险“impose an insurmountable burden on them
“并且”discourage people from coming out of the shadows to apply for legal
status”。我操，为省一点医保费都能让非法移民不去申请合法化。这合法化太廉价，
热脸蹭非移的冷屁股。
Republicans trying to use health-care law to derail Obama’s immigration
reform efforts
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After spending years unsuccessfully trying to overturn “Obamacare,”
Republicans are now attempting to use President Obama’s landmark health-
care law to derail his top second-term initiative — a sweeping overhaul of
the nation’s immigration system.
Conservatives in both chambers of Congress are insisting on measures that
would expand the denial of public health benefits to the nation’s 11
million illegal immigrants beyond limits set in a comprehensive bill pending
in the Senate.
In the House, Republicans are considering proposals that would deny publicly
subsidized emergency care to illegal immigrants and force them to purchase
private health insurance plans, without access to federal subsidies, as a
requirement for earning permanent legal residency.
In the Senate, Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) has endorsed an amendment to a
comprehensive immigration bill he helped negotiate that would deny health
benefits to immigrants for five years after they become legal residents —
two years after they would be eligible to become citizens under the
legislation.
Some Republicans, eager to capi-tal-ize on public uncertainty about the
complexities of the Affordable Care Act, are casting the immigration
legislation as a similarly unwieldy law.
The immigration bill “reminds me of a more recent piece of legislation:
Obamacare,” Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said on the Senate floor last week. “It
grants broad new powers to the same executive branch that today is mired in
scandal for incompetence and abuse of power. Total cost estimates are in
the trillions. And rather than fix our current immigration problems, the
bill makes many of them worse.”
The insertion of the politics of health-care reform — one of the most
polarizing issues in Washington — into the immigration debate threatens to
split open the emerging bipartisan coalitions that are crucial to passing a
bill.
This month, Rep. Raúl R. Labrador (R-Idaho) blamed a standoff over health-
care benefits for his decision to drop out of bipartisan talks with seven
colleagues who were negotiating a House alternative to the Senate
immigration proposal. That has forced House leaders to proceed with a series
of smaller-scale proposals next week in lieu of a sweeping agreement.
“When I joined the group, I was told that the aliens would have to pay for
their own health care,” Labrador told Fox News. “Now that has changed. And
I can’t agree to all of the exceptions.”
Frustrated Democrats argue that Republicans are picking a fight where one
does not exist. In both chambers, Democrats say, they have agreed that
illegal immigrants would not be eligible for public benefits — including
health-care subsidies and Medicaid — as they embark on a path to permanent
legal status, which would take at least 10 years under the Senate plan.
“We have said since Day One . . . that undocumented people will
not have access to subsidies in the Affordable Care Act,” House Minority
Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said last month. “Any thought that we want
to do something different than that is simply not true. It is a bottom line.
No need to even discuss it.”
Under current law, illegal immigrants and legal residents of fewer than five
years are mostly barred from receiving benefits under Medicaid, the joint
state-federal health insurance program for the poor. That restriction does
not apply to poor immigrants who show up at hospital emergency rooms,
however.
While writing the Affordable Care Act, Congress sidestepped the dicey issue
of illegal immigration by excluding immigrants who are in the country
illegally from its provisions. That means that those immigrants will not get
government subsidies to help them buy private insurance plans, nor can they
benefit from the law’s expansion of Medicaid.
At the same time, however, they are exempted from the mandate, taking effect
next year, that every person must carry health insurance or face a tax
penalty.
Some Republicans think it would be unfair to exclude such immigrants from
the insurance mandate. One proposal championed by Labrador, according to
people familiar with the private House negotiations, would require illegal
immigrants to purchase their own insurance, without access to federal health
exchanges, as a prerequisite for citizenship.
Democrats argue that making the immigrants subject to the mandate could
impose an insurmountable burden on them because of potentially hefty
premiums that would not be offset by federal subsidies available to others.
That burden could also discourage people from coming out of the shadows to
apply for legal status, said Priscilla Huang, policy director for the
nonpartisan Asian and Pacific Islander American Health Forum.
“If we want them to become citizens and fully integrated into their
communities and our country, we should really treat them as such,” Huang
said.
Aides said Labrador simply wanted to include language in the House bill that
would ensure that illegal immigrants were responsible for paying for their
own care.
Other members of the immigration working group resisted out of fear that the
language Labrador proposed would have meant that illegal immigrants with
unpaid medical bills would not be eligible for permanent legal residency and
could be deported, according to Democratic aides.
Jennifer Ng’andu, the director of health policy for the National Council of
La Raza, said the true motive for some Republicans is unrelated to
immigration reform. Rather, she said, it is to perpetuate “ideological
warfare” against the Obama health-care law.
In 2009, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) shouted “You lie!” after Obama said,
during his State of the Union address, that immigrants in the country
illegally would not be eligible for federal health-care subsidies. Since the
Affordable Care Act was narrowly approved a year later, the House GOP has
voted to repeal it more than 30 times, symbolic gestures that had no chance
of consideration in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
As the Obama administration has moved to sign up uninsured Americans by the
October deadline, Republicans have sought to paint a picture of widespread
confusion and chaos.
In a video message to constituents Friday, Rubio said that “Obamacare is
bad for America” and that the health-care program “can never and will
never work and may even contribute to bankrupting our country.”
Last week, Rubio announced he would co-sponsor an amendment with Sen. Orrin
G. Hatch (R-Utah) to mandate that illegal immigrants cannot get access to
public benefits until five years after they earn green cards signifying
permanent legal status.
That would mean that, although such immigrants could be eligible for
citizenship after 13 years, they would not be allowed to access the health
subsidies for at least 15 years.
“The 13-year-long pathway to citizenship will be hard enough,” said Sen.
Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii). “The restrictions on federal safety-net programs
make the pathway even more treacherous.” |
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