Illegals to Kill Obama Health Plan?
Jerome Corsi
June 29, 2009
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With President Obama determined to get a universal health insurance program passed this year, the administration is overlooking an important part of the debate that might just kill the bill altogether: A surprisingly large percentage of those currently lacking health insurance are illegal immigrants, Jerome Corsi's Red Alert reports.
"It is not too much to say that the nation's problem with those lacking health care insurance is being driven by the nation's immigration policy," Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies told Red Alert.
A statistical study Camarota conducted shows 34 percent of immigrants lack health insurance, compared to 13 percent of natives.
Moreover, immigrants and their U.S.-born children account for 71 percent of the increase in the uninsured over the last two decades, since 1989.
Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center of Immigration Studies, agrees with Camarota.
"We don't have an uninsured crisis," Krikorian told the Palm Beach Post. "We have an immigration crisis."
"The long-term goal has to be reducing immigration of people who are going to end up in a hospital unable to pay," Krikorian stressed. "We need less legal immigration and better enforcement against illegal immigration."
Data from the Rand Corporation corroborate Camarota's findings at the Center for Immigration Studies.
Rand research found 68 percent of the illegal immigrants studied had no health insurance, compared with 17 percent of native-born Americans.
"Despite these statistics, the Obama administration appears ready to extend government-funded universal health insurance even to illegal immigrants, as well as to their children regardless whether the children are born in the United States," Corsi wrote.
He said blogger Ezra Klein at the Washington Post makes a convoluted argument for including illegal immigrants in government-funded universal health care reform.
"If you're an unskilled or semi-skilled native worker, the situation you should really fear is one in which employers need to provide health care for you but not the undocumented immigrants competing for the same job," Klein wrote. "That's a world in which the cost of your labor is far higher than the cost of an undocumented immigrant's labor. It makes you economically inefficient. It makes you less likely to get hired."
Corsi noted, "Somehow, Klein never contemplates another solution, namely, securing the border and enforcing labor laws regarding illegal immigrants by prosecuting companies that hire them."
He said if the illegal immigrant issue surfaces in the Senate debate over government-funded universal health care insurance, the controversy might make the health care legislation difficult to pass.
"The history of passing 'comprehensive immigration reform' should not be encouraging for the Obama administration," Corsi wrote.
"Comprehensive immigration reform" became a catchphrase in the 109th and 110th Congresses for the legislation cosponsored by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy and Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain to create a "path to citizenship" and a "guest worker program" for more than 12 million illegal immigrants the federal government admits are living in the U.S.
Characterized as a "shamnesty" bill by opponents that viewed the measure as amnesty for illegal immigrants, the U.S. Senate finally defeated repeated Bush administration efforts that trace back to 2005. A June 7, 2007, vote on cloture failed in the Senate by a vote of 34-61.
WND has reported that President Obama plans to reintroduce "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation yet this year.
Corsi wrote that if the illegal immigration issue surfaces in the health care debate and Obama supports extending government-funded universal health insurance to illegal immigrants, both health care reform and comprehensive immigration reform will be dead issues for the 111th Congress.
Red Alert's author, whose books "The Obama Nation" and "Unfit for Command" have topped the New York Times best-sellers list, received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972. For nearly 25 years, beginning in 1981, he worked with banks throughout the U.S. and around the world to develop financial services marketing companies to assist banks in establishing broker/dealers and insurance subsidiaries to provide financial planning products and services to their retail customers. In this career, Corsi developed three different third-party financial services marketing firms that reached gross sales levels of $1 billion in annuities and equal volume in mutual funds. In 1999, he began developing Internet-based financial marketing firms, also adapted to work in conjunction with banks.
In his 25-year financial services career, Corsi has been a noted financial services speaker and writer, publishing three books and numerous articles in professional financial services journals and magazines.
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