Friday, June 30, 2006
Editorial: The poor, the sick, the burdened
A new Medicaid requirement meant to punish illegal immigrants will harm Americans.
From the RoundTable blog
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Unless the courts intervene, 50 million poor, disabled and elderly citizens could be denied health care until they prove they are indeed true-blooded, born-in-the-U.S.A. Americans.
The new law, spawned when Georgia Rep. Charlie Norwood indulged his xenophobic tendencies, aims to make sure not one illegal alien takes advantage of the benevolent Medicaid system -- a program that is for bona fide citizens and very select legal immigrants.
Never mind that the Health and Human Service's inspector general has found few abuses. The Republican Norwood hypothesizes that the unresolved illegal immigration crisis could bankrupt the Medicaid system.
He included in the Deficit Reduction Act a requirement that every Medicaid recipient -- from newborn child to severely disabled adult to nursing home resident -- must step forward starting July 1 and prove citizenship. Congress left the details up to Health and Human Services to dictate to the state. Those details are doozies.
People who have a hard time scraping together bus fare must present their passports to their state Medicaid office. Don't have one? Then an original birth certificate together with a government-issued photo identification will suffice. Don't have that, either? Tough luck.
A class-action suit filed Wednesday in Chicago seeks to overturn the requirements. The plaintiffs include an elderly African-American woman who doesn't have a birth certificate because she was born at home (a common occurrence before the 1940s when many Southern hospitals were for whites only), and a stroke victim who can't talk, has no family or paperwork and relies on church members to tend to his affairs.
They and countless Americans like them will be purged from the Medicaid rolls. Norwood's plan to save money comes at the expense of poor and elderly Americans' health. Yet any dollars saved on actual health care will be burned as the states add more employees to review documentation.
The lawsuit might stop this. But so could congressional Republicans if they realized their nativist zeal actually harms the very Americans they seek to protect.
