How Obamacare Will Affect Immigrants

By  •  Monday March 4, 2013 9:59 AM PDT  •  3 Comments

If you are a legal resident alien, you will be required to obtain the same government-mandated health coverage that US citizens must obtain. However, if you have been here for less than five years, and if your income falls below 133 percent of the federal poverty level, you will not be allowed to enroll in Medicaid. Instead, you will be able to do something low-income US citizens cannot do: obtain highly subsidized insurance (paying a premium, say, of ten cents on the dollar) in a health insurance exchange. If, as we expect, Medicaid insurance is lower quality insurance, you will have access to better insurance than a US citizen with the same income!

If you are an undocumented immigrant you will not be subject to the individual insurance mandates, and you will not be fined if you fail to purchase health insurance. Nor will you be allowed to enroll in Medicaid or buy insurance in the health insurance exchange. However, hospital emergency rooms will not be able to deny you healthcare if you are in need. What makes this surprising is that the most common argument for an individual mandate is that the uninsured should have to contribute to their own healthcare instead of getting it for free in the emergency room. This is why US citizens will be required to pay hefty fines if they do not obtain insurance. If you are here illegally, however, you’re an exception to this rule.

For more about healthcare reform, please see my Independent Institute book, Priceless: Curing the Healthcare.

[Cross-posted at Psychology Today]

Tags: Healthcare, Immigration, Insurance, Regulation

3 Comment(s)

  1. What is happening to the USA, why should the citizens be forced into outrageously high insurance polices and high medical bills and people who are not citizens get it free, what idiot made these rules, and if our country is so broke, how does the government keep getting all that money to give away to other countries while our own is struggling? Does not make sense.

    Dorothy smith | Mar 4, 2013 | Reply

  2. Are you ph****** kidding me?!! Obama and illegal immigrants should be sent back to their homeland!!

    Al | Mar 4, 2013 | Reply

  3. John, this makes me so angry. Who the hell do these people think they are?

    They can “mandate” till kingdom come, but it won’t change the fundamentals of economics or the disastrous consequences which will result from all this madness.

    But then, when did the federal government ever worry about any of that? After all, they can print all the money they want, right?

    Clearly, they either know absolutely nothing about economics, or they know all about it and are deliberately trying to destroy the system.

    The latter appears to be much more likely. But this leaves the rest of us with a great conundrum. Why would they do an insane thing like this?

    We are going to need some damned good contrarian thinking to figure out how to deal effectively with these crooks. Since the world is governed far more by unpredictability than by conscious planning, we are going to have to approach this problem the same way.

    I can’t say more here in public (for obvious reasons), but wise ones will get what I mean.

    For those who don’t get what I mean, try reading the books of Jane Jacobs. As an introduction to her work, go to http://www.mises.org and enter her name in the search bar.

    Martin Faries | Mar 6, 2013 | Reply

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