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August 11, 2009
Exclusive: Pelosi Promises Health Care for All By Halloween – Does That Include Illegals?
“Let me assure you,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi assured her constituents this weekend. “There will be a health care reform bill passed.”
Mrs. Pelosi said that she is devoting all of her time during the August recess to drumming up support for the planned $3.5 trillion overhaul of the country’s health care system.
“It's just bringing everybody to the table," Pelosi said of her mediations. "I don't know how many times I've been in meetings where I say, 'It's up to you. You're not leaving until this is resolved.' They are all decisions, you can talk about them forever, you can put it off, but the fact is ... we are going to be positioned" for the fall.
She called health care battle a "joy.”
Although resolved to have the legislation (H.R. 3200) signed into law by Halloween, Speaker Pelosi remains equivocal when asked if the bill will provide coverage for the 12 to 32 million illegal aliens who now reside in the U.S.
“If you’re in this country illegally, should you be able to get health care?” CNN’s John King asked Mrs. Pelosi.
“No, illegal immigrants are not covered by this plan,” she replied.
“And so what happens to a public hospital then, if they walk into the emergency room? The hospital I was at this week, they said, you know, they do 6,000 births a year there and 70 percent of them are for undocumented [patients],” said King.
“I don’t know about that,” said Pelosi. “But I do know that the law requires that if somebody comes in off the street and needs care; that is extended. What we see in this legislation is that people will have access to affordable health care, and it will diminish the number of people going into those private, public hospitals in the manner in which you described.”
Mrs. Pelosi’s remarks are downright deceptive, according to Congressman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), who points out that the proposed health care legislation “contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits.”
These loopholes, Rep. Smith maintains, are “no accident.” He maintains that the proposed legislation, despite months of debate, still contains no mechanism for verifying if applicants are legal residents or not.
The Republican members of the Ways and Means Committee attempted to address this loophole by an amendment proposed by Congressman Dick Heller (R-NV) which would have required applicants for government provided or subsidized health care to demonstrate eligibility through the Income and Eligibility Verification System (IEVS) and the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) systems.
But, on July 29th, the Heller Amendment was soundly defeated by the following 26 Majority Members of the House Ways & Means Committee: Xavier Becerra (CA), Shelley Berkley (NV), Earl Blumenauer (OR), Joe Crowley (NY), Artur Davis (AL), Danny Davis (IL), Lloyd Doggett (TX), Bob Etheridge (NC), Brian Higgins (NY), Ron Kind (WI), John Larson (CT), Sander Levin (MI), John Lewis (GA), Jim McDermott (WA), Kendrick Meek (FL), Richard Neal (MA), Bill Pascrell (NJ), Earl Pomeroy (ND), Chairman Charlie Rangel (NY), Linda Sanchez (CA), Allyson Schwartz (PA), Pete Stark (CA), John Tanner (TN), Mike Thompson (CA), Chris Van Hollen (MD), and John Yarmuth (KY).
The Federal for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) believes the legislation is now purposefully self-contradictory in order to ensure that the millions of illegal Latinos will receive coverage. FAIR points out that while one provision of the proposed health care reform bill states illegal immigrants will not be eligible for benefits, the legislation remains without any system of verification for determining if a patient is a legal or illegal U. S. resident.
Moreover, Fair insists, the bill leaves open the possibility that if one citizen family member is eligible for benefits, then the entire family — including illegal immigrants — is also eligible for the benefits.
“At a time when the federal government is running trillion dollar deficits, and the projected costs of the proposed health care overhaul seem to grow with each passing day, the committee that writes our tax laws wants Americans to pay for the health care costs of illegal aliens,” says FAIR President Dan Stein. “Given the opportunity to close loopholes that would cost the public billions of dollars each year, Democrats on the committee unanimously rejected an amendment that would bar illegal aliens from a national health care program.”
The cost of treating illegal aliens amounts to nearly $11 billion a year, according to calculations done by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a non-profit group that opposes illegal immigration. And that cost is not expected to go away if a health insurance reform bill becomes law.
According to FAIR’s Director of Special Projects Jack Martin, illegal immigrants presently cost U. S. taxpayers $10.7 billion a year for health care. The numbers are contained in a report that FAIR plans to publish in the near future.
“The current health care bill is looking as if it is leaving a very large loophole for medical coverage being provided to illegal aliens,” Martin said.
FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Paul L. Williams is the author of The Day of Islam: The Annihilation of America and the Western World, The Al Qaeda Connection, and other best-selling books. He is a frequent guest on such national news networks as ABC News, CBS News, Fox News, MSNBC, and NPR. Visit his website at http://thelastcrusade.org.
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