JOE'S ILLEGALS ARE ONLY 'CHEAP' TO EMPLOYERS OF ILLEGALS WHO REFUSE TO PAY LIVING WAGES TO LEGALS
Overall, open-ended legal migration is praised by business and progressives partly because migrants’ arrivals help transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.
Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from children to their parents, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.
Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control and pay cuts on American professionals, corral technological innovation by minimizing the employment of American grads, undermine labor rights, and even get many progressive journalists to cheerlead for Wall Street’s priorities.
66% of Republican Voters Oppose Cutting Medicare and Social Security Benefits
An NBC News poll released Tuesday found that cutting Medicare and Social Security is the most unpopular proposal among Republican voters.
The NBC News survey found that a proposal to address America’s deficit problem by cutting Social Security and Medicare for those not already enrolled would make 77 percent of respondents less likely to vote for that candidate, and only 12 percent said that the proposal would make it more likely for them to vote for that candidate.
Sixty-six percent of Republican primary voters would be less likely to vote for a GOP candidate if he or she backed proposals to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits; only 19 percent of GOP voters would back a candidate that would cut these programs.
Former Vice President Mike Pence has often discussed the need to address America’s deficit problem.
“The biggest drivers of runaway spending are our New Deal and Great Society programs upon which Americans depend every day, Social Security and Medicare,” Pence said in his presidential announcement speech.
Former President Donald Trump has frequently warned Republicans to not vote for any cuts to the entitlement programs when Republicans were negotiating with President Joe Biden over a debt ceiling deal.
Donald J. Trump For President 2024
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), while running for Congress in 2012, discussed the need to restructure Medicare and Social Security to make the programs “financially sustainable.” Trump has attacked DeSantis frequently for this position, but DeSantis has said he would not touch entitlement programs if elected.
In March, DeSantis said, “I have more seniors [in Florida] than just about anyone as a percentage. You know, we’re not going to mess with Social Security as Republicans.”
The poll’s results come as President Biden has moved to slash benefits for Medicare Advantage. Biden has frequently claimed that Republicans want to cut the entitlement programs.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) said they would cut Medicare Advantage by 1.12 percent in 2024, which is not as significant a cut as the administration proposed two months ago.
Sean Moran is a policy reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.
Millions losing Medicaid coverage, other benefits, after Biden-Republican deals
Some 1.5 million people have been cut off Medicaid coverage over the past month, according to reports by the Associated Press and the Kaiser Family Foundation. These cuts, which are expected to swell and impact a staggering 8–24 million people, are a direct consequence of the Biden administration’s agreement with congressional Republicans last December on a budget deal that protected military spending but opened the way to massive cuts in social spending.
Millions more will lose eligibility for other social benefits as a result of Biden’s decision to end the public health emergency declaration for COVID-19. Biden allowed the PHE declaration to expire on May 11, although the pandemic continues to rage, concealed by the refusal of federal and state authorities to collect data on the impact of COVID-19 on the population. As a result, social benefits linked to the emergency declaration have expired.
Other social benefits are scheduled to expire throughout the summer. By mid-August, students with college student loan debt must begin making repayments that were suspended for the duration of the official COVID emergency. Biden’s executive action to forgive a portion of this debt, a separate measure, is currently before the Supreme Court and could be overturned by the end of this month.
Still more benefits will expire at the end of the current fiscal year, on September 30.
The summer months will thus bring a tidal wave of human suffering that hits not only the poorest sections of the population, but broad sections of young people and virtually the entire working class. This is under conditions where inflation and wage suppression, with the assistance of the unions, have steadily driven down the real incomes of working class families.
The crisis for Medicaid recipients is the most immediate. Throughout the pandemic, in return for stepped-up federal aid, state governments were barred from disenrolling Medicaid recipients except in cases of voluntary withdrawal, a move out of state, or death. With the end of the emergency, many states have begun to aggressively disqualify Medicaid recipients, a campaign pursued with special fervor by right-wing Republican state governments in Arkansas, Indiana, Utah and other states in the South and Great Plains.
Analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), a health policy organization, shows that at least 1.349 million Medicaid recipients have been disenrolled as of June 20, 2023, based on the most current data from 22 states. Overall, 35 percent of people with a completed renewal were disenrolled, while 65 percent had their coverage renewed.
KFF places the number of people losing coverage at a low estimate of 8 million, a mid-range estimate of 17 million, and a high estimate of 24 million. Such calculations are difficult as states are not required to provide detailed figures on Medicaid disenrollment to the federal government.
According to publicly available reports and data obtained by the Associated Press, about 1.5 million people have already lost their Medicaid coverage in more than two dozen states that began the disenrollment process in April or May. For people whose cases were decided in May, half or more were dropped from coverage in Florida, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Nevada, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah and West Virginia.
Florida leads the way, with nearly 303,000 people losing their Medicaid benefits, according to the KFF Medicaid Enrollment and Unwinding Tracker. Sixty-five percent of enrollees lost their coverage for “procedural” reasons, while 35 percent lost coverage due to ineligibility, the most common reason being their income was too high.
Florida is one of 10 states that have not expanded Medicaid under provisions of the Affordable Care Act, which expanded coverage under the program for nearly all adults with incomes up to 138 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. The abysmally low threshold for Medicaid in 2023 is $14,580 annual income for a single adult, $30,000 for a family of four and $50,560 for a family of eight.
In Arkansas, about 140,000 people have been deemed ineligible for Medicaid coverage since April. The largest number to lose coverage in May were enrolled in ARHOME, the state’s Medicaid expansion program, followed by ARKids A, which serves children from the state’s lowest-income families.
The immediate cause for most losing their coverage in what is being dubbed the “Medicaid unwinding” is the bureaucratic systems in place for people to “reenroll” in Medicaid due to the ending of the PHE.
Many people who have already lost or will lose coverage have been dropped because of “technicalities”—they haven’t returned the paperwork, they omitted required documents, their paperwork was sent to the wrong address, they received paperwork in a language they don’t understand. State agencies tasked with reviewing reenrollment are understaffed; personnel are poorly trained. Many people facing disenrollment are not even aware that they are being dropped from coverage.
In Utah, nearly 56 percent of people were dropped from Medicaid in early reviews. In New Hampshire, 44 percent received cancellation letters within the first two months. In its first month of reviews, South Dakota ended coverage for 10 percent of all Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) enrollees.
Miriam Harmatz, founder of the Florida Health Justice Project, told KFF Health News that some cancellation notices in the state are vague and could violate due process rules. She also said state officials have sent cancellation letters to clients with disabled children who most likely still qualify for coverage.
The bureaucratic nightmare for those seeking reenrollment is indeed real. However, as with all matters related to the COVID-19 pandemic under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the mass disenrollment is not fundamentally a result of “red tape,” but rather a deliberate policy aimed at making working people pay with their health and lives while corporations continue to amass profits and the ruling class pursues its military aims.
Medicaid was founded in 1965 as part of the Johnson administration’s “War on Poverty,” the last gasp of social reformism in the United States. The program is jointly funded by the federal government and the states, with the states primarily responsible for its management.
Under the PHE established on January 31, 2020, states were required to maintain “continuous enrollment” of Medicaid beneficiaries in return for a 6.2 percentage increase in federal spending for the program. Under the omnibus spending bill passed by Congress in December 2022, states were allowed to resume coverage terminations effective April 1, 2023.
As of February 2023, more than 93 million people—nearly 28 percent of the US population—were enrolled in Medicaid or CHIP. The latter provides low-cost health coverage for children in families deemed to earn too much to qualify for Medicaid. Children accounted for more than 46 percent of Medicaid and CHIP enrollment. Between March 2020 and April 2023, more than 23 million recipients were added to the Medicaid rolls.
Justifying disenrolling Medicaid recipients, Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders wrote in an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that “thousands of Arkansans who ordinarily wouldn’t qualify for Medicaid are taking resources from those who need that safety net.” She claimed that “those who lose Medicaid coverage can get health insurance through their jobs or the [Affordable Care Act] health care marketplace.”
The reality is different for the millions who now stand to lose their Medicaid coverage. Between February 2020 and March 2023, the official uninsured rate dropped to its lowest level on record, in early 2022. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the uninsured rate among those under 65 is projected to rise from 8.3 percent today to 9.3 percent next year, likely an underestimate.
Arkansas resident Janette Hall told CNN that she was initially told she would lose her Medicaid because she made too much money. She then realized that it must be because she began collecting Social Security at age 62 to add to her earnings as a cook for a nonprofit group.
Hall suffers from serious foot issues but said she cannot afford the $78 monthly premium she was quoted. She said she’ll focus on home remedies to keep her feet from getting infected while she searches for affordable coverage, but for now, “I’m going to be in that camp of people who aren’t going to be going to the doctor. That’s what you do when you don’t want to get that bill coming to you.”
The great “unwinding” of Medicaid is of a piece with the targeting of the Social Security retirement program and the Medicare program for deep cuts and ultimate privatization or elimination. The omnibus budget bill passed by Congress and endorsed by President Biden in December raised military spending by $76 billion, or roughly 10 percent, to a record $858 billion.
But as the WSWS has noted, “The proportion of the budget devoted to activities which could conceivably benefit working people is well under 20 percent.” In addition to allowing states to begin kicking people off Medicaid, the Democrats dropped a proposal that would have restored the child tax credit to the levels that prevailed in 2020-21 as part of pandemic relief.
Despite the Biden administration’s insistence that the pandemic is over, it continues to sicken and kill. Official figures place the US death toll at more than 1.1 million and millions the world over suffer from debilitating Long COVID. The ruling class has ended the collection of data on the disease, ended all mitigation measures, and refuses to promote and fund any technologies to protect workers on the job or students and teachers in schools.
Similarly, millions face destitution through being cut off from Medicaid and food stamp benefits, even as rents, mortgage rates and prices for basic necessities rise—and cuts in real wages are imposed on those who are working.
The health care system in America, which places workers and their families at the mercy of private health care chains, drugmakers and insurance companies, is subordinated to private profit. Within this framework, health care, a basic human right, is denied to millions. Genuine socialized medicine must be fought for by the working class as part of a socialist program that ends the domination of the capitalist market over the health and lives of the population.
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Halts Health Care for Illegal Aliens After Realizing Cost Burden to Taxpayers
Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) is halting a program that offers taxpayer-subsidized health care benefits to illegal aliens after realizing the tremendous cost to the state’s taxpayers.
The program, which secures taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits for illegal aliens, was launched last year with help from Pritzker. As Breitbart News reported, Republicans across Illinois had warned the program would soon cost taxpayers billions in costs.
Today, close to 700,000 illegal aliens live in the sanctuary state of Illinois.
This week, Pritzker announced he will now have to quasi-halt the program starting next month, keeping it in place only for a certain number of older illegal aliens, because the costs are too high for taxpayers to bear.
“We need to make sure we are living within our fiscal limits in the state of Illinois,” Pritzker said this week. “That is something that wasn’t done for a lot of years.”
In April, State Rep. Norine Hammond (R) said that “dramatic growth” in Illinois’s illegal alien population and their enrollment for healthcare benefits “will require nearly a billion dollars in general revenue funds to support this program in Fiscal Year 2024.”
The announcement comes as research recently showed the extent to which health benefits for illegal aliens are costing American taxpayers.
A House Homeland Security Committee report revealed that illegal aliens are leaving Americans with billions of unpaid medical bills by arriving at community hospitals and passing on all the costs to local taxpayers.
In Yuma, Arizona, for instance, executives with the Yuma Regional Medical Center said that in just one year, taxpayers were left with $26 million in unpaid medical bills from illegal aliens who showed up to the hospital requesting free care.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Joe Biden: ‘Absolutely Bizarre’ to Suggest Limit on U.S. Capacity to Absorb Immigrants
LAS VEGAS, Nevada — Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigned inside a Chinese restaurant on Tuesday evening, telling supporters it was “bizarre” to suggest a limit on immigration to the U.S.
Biden promised to expand immigration to the U.S. if elected president.
“Folks, look — the idea that there’s some limitation on the capacity of anyone who — on the immigrants in this country is absolutely bizarre! It’s absolutely bizarre.”
Biden, speaking to a packed crowd inside the Harbor Palace Seafood Restaurant on the eve of the next Democratic debate, addressed members of the Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, urging them to turn out the vote ahead of Saturday’s caucuses.
Last month, the AAPI Victory Fund super PAC endorsed Biden for president, citing his ability to defeat President Donald Trump and his experience working with immigrant communities from South Asia, East Asia and the Pacific generally.
Though the AAPI immigrant community is politically diverse, it has trended Democratic in recent years.
Last year, Breitbart News reported, another local AAPI organization in Las Vegas expressed opposition to President Trump’s proposed merit-based system for legal immigration.
On Tuesday, Biden promised, if elected, to allow family reunification visas.
“We should be able to increase, to three million people, the people who could come for family reunification. Period, period, period, period.”
He called the idea that the U.S. could not “reunite” more families “absolutely bizarre.”
Biden also reminded his audience that Latinos were not the only beneficiaries of President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which applied to those brought to the country illegally as children.
He said there were “thousands and thousands of AAPI ‘Dreamers'” who had benefited from DACA as well.
Afterwards, Biden greeted attendees, some of whom proceeded to the Chinatown Mall to cast early votes before the polling place there closed.
Biden hopes to finish in the top three in Nevada, and to win South Carolina on Feb. 29, to make the case that he is still a top contender for his party’s nomination. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) now leads national polls, as well as Nevada polls.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
"This is how they will destroy America from within. The leftist billionaires who orchestrate these plans are wealthy. Those tasked with representing us in Congress will never be exposed to the cost of the invasion of millions of migrants. They have nothing but contempt for those of us who must endure the consequences of our communities being intruded upon by gang members, drug dealers and human traffickers. These people have no intention of becoming Americans; like the Democrats who welcome them, they have contempt for us." PATRICIA McCARTHY
20 million illegals get 'free' healthcare!
1 in 5 California Hospitals Are FAILING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbfRFrwRzLQ
Leo Terrell: This is why California is the worst state in the country
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom, with the nation’s widest gap between middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest property crime rate among major cities.
The costs of illegal immigration are being carefully hidden by Democrats. MONICA SHOWALTER
California approves ‘shocking’ policy giving weekly checks to migrants: Report
Migrant enclaves already are at the top of the U.S. lists for bad places to - 10 of the 50 worst places in America to live according to this list are in California, and all of them are famous for their illegal populations. MONICA SHOWALTER
House GOP Report: Illegal Aliens Costing American Hospitals Billions in Unpaid Medical Bills
Illegal aliens released into the United States interior are costing American taxpayers, and the public hospitals they help fund, billions in unpaid medical bills every year, a report from Republicans on the House Homeland Security Committee details.
The report, wherein Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) notes the failures of President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, revealed the extent to which illegal immigration wreaks havoc on the nation’s hospitals intended to provide first-class care for Americans and legal immigrants.
“Hospital and emergency room care for illegal aliens is one of the most significant expenses,” the report states, mentioning that illegal aliens typically have no form of health insurance and therefore rely especially on emergency room services for free care.
“Consequently, this has led to significant costs for hospitals because providers are often not reimbursed for these services,” the report states:
In a January 2021 filing challenging the Biden administration’s deportation moratorium, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton wrote that his state alone was required to pay anywhere between $62- 90 million per year to cover illegal aliens under its Emergency Medicaid program. [Emphasis added]
He also pointed out that between 2006-2008, uncompensated costs borne by Texas state hospitals providing care to illegal aliens ranged from $597 million to $717 million. That’s as much as $1.03 billion in May 2023 dollars. [Emphasis added]
In Florida, for Fiscal Year 2021, illegal aliens cost state hospitals about $312 million. Meanwhile, in Illinois, a statewide healthcare benefits program for illegal aliens has ballooned from a projected $2 to $4 million cost to what has now become a $1.1 billion program for taxpayers.
Locally, in Yuma, Arizona, executives with the Yuma Regional Medical Center said that in just one year, taxpayers were left with $26 million in unpaid medical bills from illegal aliens who showed up to the hospital requesting free care.
“Some migrants come to us with minor ailments but many of them come in with significant disease. We have had migrant patients on dialysis, cardiac catheterization and in need of heart surgery,” Dr. Robert Trenschel, CEO of the hospital, previously told the House Homeland Security Committee. “Many are very sick. They have long-term complications of chronic disease that have not been cared for. Some end up in the ICU for 60 days or more.”
One of the main strains on the hospital is pregnant illegal aliens arriving with little-to-no prior prenatal care, putting them at high risk for potentially serious complications which results in longer, costly stays at the hospital.
The issue has been raised by more than just House Republicans.
Most recently, Democrat presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. visited the U.S.-Mexico border to warn of the massive waves of illegal immigration that are straining the nation’s security and social safety net resources.
During his visit, Kennedy said he talked to local officials in Arizona who explained that their hospitals’ maternity wards are so packed with pregnant illegal aliens that American women are having to reschedule their delivery dates.
“Moms occupied 32 of 36 beds in Yuma hospital maternity ward so that local moms had to delay induced pregnancies for two weeks,” Kennedy wrote in a Twitter post.
Months ago, the Federation for American Immigration Reform reported that illegal immigration costs the nation’s hospital systems at least $23 billion annually — $8.2 billion of which is uncompensated medical care for illegal aliens.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
Biden’s DHS Rewards Sanctuary Cities, NGOs with $290M for Resettling Illegal Aliens in U.S.
President Joe Biden is rewarding sanctuary cities and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) with more than $290 million in taxpayer money for resettling border crossers and illegal aliens across the United States.
Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is taking the millions in taxpayer money from the Shelter and Services Program (SSP) — a federal initiative launched by the administration and funded by Congress.
This week, DHS officials announced that more than $290 million from SSP had been rewarded to various towns and cities, many of which are sanctuary jurisdictions, along with NGOs like Catholic Charities and United Way for helping resettle hundreds of thousands of border crossers and illegal aliens across American communities after their release into the nation’s interior.
In total, 34 cities, towns, and NGOs are getting the millions in federal funds.
Many of the cities are sanctuary jurisdictions. For example, San Diego County, California, a sanctuary jurisdiction, is set to secure more than $15 million in SSP funds, while the sanctuary city of Denver, Colorado, will receive more than $8.6 million.
The sanctuary city of New York City is securing the largest amount of SSP funds, more than $104 million, to aid border crossers and illegal aliens, while the sanctuary city of Chicago has scored more than $10.5 million and the sanctuary state of Illinois will get nearly $19.4 million.
The World Hunger Ecumenical Arizona Task Force (WHEAT), an NGO based in Arizona, is set to get $15.5 million to help border crossers and illegal aliens across the state and Catholic Charities, across California and Texas, will rake in more than $24 million in SSP funds.
Last month, Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Lance Gooden (R-TX) requested a full accounting by the Biden administration in regard to federal funds being rewarded to cities and NGOs that are aiding illegal immigration in the U.S.
“The surge of illegal immigration, fueled in part by NGOs like those on the [Emergency Food and Shelter Program] National Board is unsustainable and unfair to law-abiding citizens and immigrants alike,” Gooden said.
Illegal immigration imposes an enormous burden on American taxpayers.
Annually, the 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the U.S. costs taxpayers more than $143 billion. That amount, though, does not include any of the social and economic costs — such as higher housing prices, depleted wages, lost jobs, increased crime, and strained public resources at hospitals and schools — associated with illegal immigration.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.
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