Obamacare For Illegal Aliens Could Cost Taxpayers $23 Billion A Year, Study Shows
by Joseph Curl
TheGatewayPundit.com
October 10, 2019
Case in point: A new study shows that taxpayers could have to pay out as much as $23 billion a year to give “Obamacare” health coverage to illegal aliens.
The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) calculates that there are nearly 5 million illegals who would qualify for subsidies through the health care system created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by former president Barack Obama. The average cost would be about $4,500, so if all of them took the subsidies, it’d cost $22.5 billion.
Even if less than half enroll, it would still cost $10 billion.
“Many of the Democratic candidates for president have endorsed providing health insurance to illegal immigrants. This analysis estimates the cost of providing illegal immigrants access to the existing system of government health benefits for low-income people,” CIS writes.
“?We estimate that there are 4.9 million uninsured illegal immigrants with incomes low enough to qualify for Medicaid or Advanced Premium Tax Credits (APTC), which are the subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Assuming a realistic enrollment rate, the cost of providing ACA subsidies to illegal immigrants would be about $10 billion per year, with costs rising to as much as $23 billion per year if all eligible illegal immigrants enrolled. Costs would be similar under a hybrid approach that provides Medicaid for the lowest-income illegal immigrants and ACA subsidies for those with higher incomes.”
CIS said continuing to allow foreigners to flow in illegally will create “a significant burden for taxpayers.”
“Numbers aside, the fact that presidential candidates are advocating spending billions of dollars on people who are in the country illegally is significant in its own right. It suggests that allowing in large numbers of less-educated workers will inevitably generate significant political pressure to provide them access to social programs. If there is significant political pressure to provide coverage to people in the country illegally, it seems almost certain that over time pressure will grow to provide healthcare to low-wage guestworkers and other ‘temporary’ immigrants as well.
“The high cost of providing healthcare to less-educated workers who earn modest wages is a reminder that tolerating illegal immigration or allowing such workers into the country legally is likely to create a significant burden for taxpayers,” CIS writes.
Cities are also being crushed by illegal aliens. Los Angeles County paid nearly $1.3 billion in welfare money during 2015 and 2016 to families of illegal aliens. That number amounts to one-quarter of the total spent on the county’s entire needy population, according to Fox News.
In 2015, more than 58,000 families received $602 million in benefits. The next year, some 64,000 families received $675 million.
Meanwhile, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that more than 22 million non-citizens now live in the United States.
The Bureau on Thursday released details from its annual American Community Survey. According to estimates extrapolated from data collected, 22.1 million are “not a U.S. citizen,” the data showed.
