Have you noticed that the same people who justify the war in Iraq by claiming it was our duty to save the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein absolutely bar giving health care to undocumented immigrants. Yes, Congressman Joe Wilson and his friends. The argument: undocumented immigrants are not citizens and therefore not entitled to U.S. government support.
But the Iraqis are also not U.S. citizens. Besides which they're halfway across the world instead of right here amongst us. In fact we have much less in common with them than we do with our neighbors from across the southern border. Yet the government is spending trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of U.S. casualties in the cause of helping them. Come to think of it, that's the new justification for the war in Afghanistan as well. We can't leave because the Afghans need our help and would fall apart without us. So we need to keep spending lives and billions to aid them.
Of course that's true of the Israelis, Egyptians, Pakistanis, and all the other big recipients of U.S. aid. They're emphatically not citizens. Indeed most of them hate our guts. And yet we ship them billions a year. In return we get – a lot of grief.
Providing health care to whoever needs it, including those without papers, not only doesn't get anyone hurt, but saves us grief and money too. The only health option the undocumented have right now is the most expensive one around: the emergency room. Anything else is cheaper than that.
So while the faux debate rages among the loud and imbecilic about how to pay for a health care system so universal it covers everybody who needs it, no questions asked, here's a practical suggestion: shut down all our wars, all foreign aid that doesn't go directly to funding human capital and, while we're at it, all the billions we spend assisting stupid lost causes like the war on drug gangs in Columbia and Mexico. All the savings will pay for health care with money to spare.