Campaign Action
White House aide Stephen Miller’s proposed plan to punish legal immigrants who have accessed services like Obamacare by stomping on their chances to gain U.S. citizenship stands to have devastating effects that could spur “a public health crisis,” one advocate says. We know this because, Alberto Gonzalez of the advocacy group Community Catalyst tells The Washington Post, “the mere suggestion of the expanded policy has already had a ‘real chilling effect’ on immigrants using health-care services.”
Earlier this year, Daniel Bouton, director of the Community Council in Dallas, said his nonprofit health organization was already seeing troubling signs that mass deportation policies were leading Latinos and immigrants to forgo health services altogether. One woman the organization had previously helped sign up for health insurance, a legal permanent resident from Mexico, dropped her coverage altogether—because her husband is undocumented. She was also “considering not re-enrolling their children, 15 and 18, in the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), even though they were born in the United States.”
Miller’s proposal—expected to be unveiled within the coming weeks—could also target legal immigrants who have accessed CHIP for their children, children’s health be damned. “If implemented,” The Washington Post continues, “the implications for health care would be sweeping,” adding that the New England Journal of Medicine estimates that as many as one million people with legal status could become uninsured through loss of Medicaid or CHIP. “Gonzalez said mental illnesses may go untreated, kids will miss pediatric visits, and families will forgo preventive care, like cancer screenings.”
According to one survey by Denver’s Mile High Health Alliance earlier this year, 87 percent of health care providers said they’d already seen a decrease in appointments by immigrants even before any proposed rule. "Sadly the rule is already having an effect,” said Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton in June, “regardless of the fact that it has yet to be released, social service providers in Minnesota report that just the prospect of this draft rule has begun causing children and adults to fear accessing safety net programs.”
Whatever policy claim administration officials have for this proposed rule change is bullcrap, unless they fully cop up to why they’re really doing this: yet another racist ploy to punish brown people. If these children can’t be locked up in cages along the border because they’re U.S. citizens, Miller and gang figure maybe they can make them sick enough to drive them and their parents out of America altogether. Party of family values, indeed.
