Why We Should Pay f or Illegal Immigrant Health Care

Much has been said about the Health Care Legislation on insuring "Illegals" including Joe "You Lie" Wilson. The Tea Baggers would have you believe that this bill is making you pay for Illegals. The Republicans would distort this so much you'd think that we're handing out "Cadillac" style health insurance to undocumented workers in order to scare you away from voting for health care.

This bill goes so far to do quite the opposite, not only does it not cover illegals, it bars illegals from buying insurance on the open market. It even bars legal residents that aren't yet citizens from buying insurance on the exchange for the first five years. But I'm not here to convince you how far right this bill is on the issue of illegals. I;m here to tell you why you should pay for illegal health care.

First off, I'd just like to ask you what are you going to say when the Migrant Worker's kid with drug resistant TB kills your kid on the school bus because they didn't have access to health care? This is a national security issue. We are so vulnerable to outbreaks such as smallpox, swine flu, avian flu, TB and a plethora of other possibilities because we don't have national health care service.
Now, I know that you're just going to say, "well they shouldn't be here in the first place." We can discuss that issue on another blog. The reality of the situation is that they are here, and if they do kill your kid on the school bus - simply saying they shouldn't be here in the first place isn't going to bring your kid back now is it? Until we have INS trucks going door to door and rounding up the illegals - they're here, taxing our health care system.

You pay for them already. The 15 million illegals that live here that don't have access to health care will use the emergency room as primary care. Hospitals only receive 4% of all the services that they bill. This is largely due to care for those that are not insured. Hospitals then inflate the price of care and pass that on to your insurance company. Your insurance company passes those costs on to you and so on. You are already paying for illegal alien health care at a premium. Getting them insured saves us money, eases the deficit, brings health care costs down, and keeps your kids safe.

The whole point on Universal Health Care was to provide access to the 50 million people in this country without health care. This bill at best covers half of that and leaves out 15 million people that will continue to show up at emergency rooms across America and make you pay for them. And not even allowing them to buy insurance on their own is simply madness. They already have IRS deductions out of their paycheck in most cases, they pay Sales Taxes on purchases and we won't even let them BUY health care. What is this? Are we paving the way for an eventuality that will prevent all undocumented people from buying or selling anything in America?

Every other developed country understands these principles. If I were in France and I broke my leg or contracted Swine Flu, I would be cared for, treated and not even issued a bill. Even if I had been living there for five years under the radar. And France is much tougher on immigration than we are. But France understands that some things are just more important than treating illegals like a socially undesired lower caste group of people.

We are the wealthiest country in the world and we don't provide health care access to all people. Instead, we'd rather pay skyrocketing prices for our health care and pretend that we don't actually pay for everyone else at a premium in the most innefficient way possible.

We tell them to play by the rules, and legal permanent residents have to wait five years to buy health insurance on the exchange. So in essence, even the ones that play by the rules, we're telling them that they don't actually qualify to play by the rules. We make it sound as if obtaining citizenship is something so easy to do, that anyone here illegally is obviously doing it by choice and should be sent to prison (which you'll pay for to the tune of about $30,000/year) As someone that has lived in a border city (San Diego, 8 years) I can tell you nothing could be further from the truth. Our immigration policy is inherently racist and we just don't have the balls to say it. You can't take our job if it's a job that none of us are actually willing to do or pay a premium for (remember Mitt Romney being busted TWICE for hiring illegals to do his landscaping) but it's totally ok to take our GOOD jobs if your from India - hell we'll even give your company tax breaks to do so.

This Health Care bill is so Right Wing I can't stand it. But it's better than no bill at all and the CBO just scored it today at $850 billion and will reduce our deficit by $120 billion. And no, you won't pay for illegal health insurance.