California Democrats have ramped up their push to extend health benefits to in-staters who immigrated unlawfully.
High-stakes legislation
Sacramento Democrats have advanced a piece of legislation, authored by State Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, that would grant access to Affordable Care Act benefits to unlawful immigrants. SB4, which would open up Medi-Cal enrollment, cleared the Assembly Health Committee on a party line vote, drawing a few dozen opponents at the bill’s hearing.
According to Lara’s website, some “three to four million people in the state will remain uninsured in spite of ACA, and almost a million of those will be undocumented residents eligible for coverage, save for their legal status.”
Last month, the state Senate voted to clear the bill, also known as the Health For All Act, with Lara describing the scheme as “a transformational and decisive step forward on the path to achieving health for all,” according to MSNBC. But Gov. Jerry Brown’s office already intervened once to scale back Democrats’ ambitions.
“The initial bill, which would have allowed all undocumented immigrants to sign up via Medi-Cal, was pared down after it was estimated to cost up to $740 million a year, a price tag Brown said was unacceptable. The governor has not indicated whether or not he’ll sign off on the latest legislation.”
Nevertheless, as Politico reported, Brown did sign off on spending “millions in state dollars to provide health care to undocumented children, mirroring similar efforts in a handful of other liberal states.”
Covered California, the state-run health care exchange, has become an Obamacare keystone, although its second-year enrollment numbers have fallen short of goals. Continued tension between Gov. Brown and state Democrats on the costs of expanding coverage could pose problems for the party on a national level. “Republicans never trusted Democrats’ repeated assurances while the law was being drafted that the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t cover undocumented immigrants,” Politico noted. “That built up to Rep. Joe Wilson’s infamous ‘You lie!’ moment, when the South Carolina Republican interrupted President Barack Obama’s 2009 health care address to Congress.”
