So it's noon and my local public radio station, KALW, is playing its weekly program New America Now. There's usually something interesting on the show, but this one sat me right up. I knew that (as a simple issue of public health, quite short-sightedly) the health care plans being reconciled leave out undocumented immigrants. (Because pandemics apparently know not to jump from Them to Us, and a kid who spent the first week of her life in Tijuana instead of San Diego surely doesn't have the same rights when she breaks her leg.)
But this still shocked me:
The Senate version of HCR specifically denies green-card holding, legal immigrants any access to Medicaid for five years.
Five years.
Demonizing illegal immigrants looks to remain popular in this scary economic climate--even though a UCLA study has just estimated that immigration reform that legalized our current 12 million undocumented immigrants would boost the GDP by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. Still, that's a well-worn political trope, stoked further by our tea-party friends--ugly, but you see it coming.
But making painstakingly legal, green-card holding immigrants, who've already jumped through the hoops and waited however many years to achieve that status, wait five years if they become so financially straitened that they need Medicaid before they can apply for it?
Five years?
That's bad public health policy, bad ethics, and it doesn't really taste like anything but--bigotry.
Or pandering to bigots.
The NILC has a page about their problems with the bill, and contact numbers to call and be appalled, here.
I'm of the camp that a flawed and deeply compromised bill is still something to start with--but this doesn't even make sense as a compromise.