A budget agreement between California lawmakers and Governor Gavin Newsom will give younger illegal aliens access to the Medi-Cal program, the state’s health insurance program for low-income Californians.
Lawmakers want to use an “extraordinary” state budget surplus to expand health care options for undocumented people while stockpiling billions of dollars in reserves in anticipation of an economic downturn, according to documents the Legislature’s Budget Conference Committee released.
The agreement marks the end of months of negotiations between Newsom and the Legislature. Lawmakers face a June 15 deadline to pass the budget, which will take effect in July.
The agreement includes funding to let young undocumented young adults under age 26 enroll in Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for low-income Californians. But it doesn’t extend that eligibility to undocumented seniors, as state senators had proposed.
The price tag is steep and, learning nothing from the failure of Obamacare, the state will force people to buy insurance:
The expansion will take effect Jan. 1, 2020 and cost $98 million in the upcoming fiscal year. It will make California the first state to allow undocumented adults to sign up for state-funded health coverage.
The budget includes a fine on people who don’t buy health insurance known as an individual mandate. The fines were initially implemented as part of the federal Affordable Care Act law known as Obamacare, but Republicans acted in 2017 to roll them back. Newsom and legislative leaders say re-imposing the penalty at the state level will shore up the state’s health insurance marketplace and keep premiums from rising dramatically.
Those legislators are just full of great ideas, aren’t they? Hey, gang! Let’s force people to buy health insurance even though the same proposal failed spectacularly at the national level!
You may recall that the individual mandate was not able to force young, healthy Americans to buy insurance in any great numbers, leading to a massive number of old and sick people signing up for Obamacare, driving up premiums, and sending most insurance companies heading for the exits.
What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Surely, one of the definitions must be that certain benefits dispensed by the government are reserved for citizens only. We are lectured about the “morality” of treating illegals with the same “compassion” we treat our less fortunate citizens. But does anyone ever contemplate the morality of telling taxpayers to support people who entered the country illegally, came uninvited, and refused to follow even the most basic procedures to enter the U.S. legally” How about the morality of telling those people from around the world who want to come to America and are going through all the procedures to become legal residents that they have to wait while hundreds of thousands of border jumpers simply show up at our doorstep and demand succor?
Advocates for illegals refuse to see a difference between citizens and non-citizens because in their worldview, the only citizens are citizens of the world. And they want to stiff the American taxpayer with the bill.
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