ShareThisThe way things stand now, Democratic proposals for health-care reform would open the door for illegal aliens to avail themselves of its benefits, but not according to President Barack Obama, who, in a holier-than-thou conference call the other day, said in effect that the illegals wouldn't get a nickel.
He delivered this particular sermon to religious groups, portraying the reform fight as justice vs. injustice, as progress vs. the status quo, as hope vs. fear, and lit into opponents as using "distortions" and "fabrications," of bearing "false witness," a biblical phrase one is tempted to apply to the saint himself.
Here, after all, is the leader who tells us repeatedly how he is going to rescue 46 million or more Americans with no health insurance through this vast, new plan he and the Democrats are cooking up. And yet, as a very bright, studious guy, as someone who bears immense responsibility for possible outcomes, he must surely know that some seven million of the uninsured are illegal aliens.
So what is it -- he's lying about the larger figure, or he's lying about excluding the seven million?
Maybe that's quibbling, but it isn't quibbling that he has said that children in the United States unlawfully should maybe be an exception to any broad exclusion of providing benefits to the illegals, nor is it quibbling to note a congressman's report that some legislative language could provide benefits to an entire family of illegal aliens if one member -- most likely a child born here -- is a citizen.
The biggie, though, is none of the above. It is that the Democrats want to make it impossible to find out if an applicant for benefits is here illegally or not, despite specific wording in bills saying they don't qualify. Republicans have tried on a number of occasions to include amendments requiring more than what Democrats want -- just writing down a Social Security number that will never be checked -- and the answer is, oh my, this is an invasion of privacy, or that mistakes could result.
It's an invasion of privacy to find out whether someone is or is not a citizen and therefore eligible for something taxpayers are providing? What blather. All of us have to produce IDs of one kind or another on a host of different occasions, from driver's licenses, to passports, to birth certificates. As for mistakes, tell me one single interaction between the government and citizens in which mistakes are not possible. I am waiting. I am still waiting.
"Saying that illegal immigrants cannot benefit while at the same time blocking verification is akin to passing a law that sets the legal drinking age at 21 years and then preventing bars from checking a patron's identification," writes Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in an op-ed piece in The Washington Times, and it seems to me that about says it.
Understand that some illegals do have insurance, that all can get treatment at emergency rooms for any health problem, and that saying they should not be entitled to benefits under health care reform is not the same as saying there should be no separate congressional review of their status. I am against granting them citizenship -- illegal immigrants increase our poverty, drive down wages, take jobs from our poorest citizens and cost more in services than they pay in taxes. Rewarding their assault on the law would only invite more to come, in my view. But I do think that the honest, serious way of addressing their health issues is in legislation specifically about them.
As for President Obama's morally superior pretensions, he should acknowledge that the fight is not between things as they are and a grand new world, but between all kinds of commonsense ideas for betterment and his wildly overreaching proposals that even nonpartisan sources say would have economically dangerous and unsustainable costs.
(Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay(at)aol.com.)
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