By Wendy Parmet
[Cross-posted from HealthLawProf Blog.]
The warning by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) last month that up to 115,000 people might lose their health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) unless they can send proof of their citizenship or immigration status was more than a bit ironic. After spending much of the year and millions of dollars trying to boost participation in the exchanges, CMS is now trying to reduce participation. In so doing, it will likely exclude many young, healthy adults, just the type of people that the exchanges need to succeed
The reason for the exclusion lies with the heated politics of immigration, and our ambivalent approach to providing immigrants with health care. Although the ACA’s critics have lambasted the law on many accounts, when the Act was first debated in Congress no charge – not even death panels! — was made more heatedly or drew more attention than the claim that the Act would cover illegal immigrants. It was that charge, after all, that Representative Joe Wilson referred to when he shouted “You lie!” during the President’s speech to a joint session of Congress.
Obama, however, didn’t lie when he promised that the Act would not cover illegal immigrants. The ACA bars from the exchanges immigrants who are “not lawfully present,” a category that includes the so-called Dreamers, the young immigrants who by virtue of an executive order have a right to live and work in the country. It also requires exchange applicants to provide their Social Security number and, in the case of non-citizens, information about their immigration status, which must be verified by the Department of Homeland Security. These are the requirements that CMS is now enforcing. Read More