This piece comes to us courtesy of Stateline. Stateline is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news service of the Pew Charitable Trusts that provides daily reporting and analysis on trends in state policy.
President Barack Obama’s controversial executive action on immigration has highlighted a thorny health care issue for states: Potentially millions of immigrants could legally stay here and work, but still lack health insurance.
Unauthorized immigrants have limited access to health care coverage, and the president’s action likely will make them ineligible for most Medicaid services and bar them from purchasing insurance on the federal and state exchanges created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Some states have sought to solve the problem for low-income immigrants with separate state-funded insurance programs. Those that have not are wrestling with the consequences of a population that is going without routine care, which can drive up costs when preventable illnesses become serious health emergencies.
Treating kidney disease as an emergency condition, for instance, costs almost five times what it would with routine care denied to unauthorized immigrants, according to a Baylor College of Medicine study published by the Texas Medical Association last year.
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States have always been free to make their own health care provisions for unauthorized and other immigrants, who are generally barred from government health benefits such as Medicaid for five years after they attain legal status.
Several states, such as Alaska and Massachusetts, provide state funding for selected unauthorized immigrants (such as children and pregnant women) for some services, according to a Pew report released last year. But other states, such as Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Virginia and Wyoming, deny Medicaid even to some immigrants with green cards who have been legal for five years.
Many states are opposed to providing help to unauthorized immigrants on ethical and financial grounds. Foes say it’s wrong to reward illegal entry into the country, and that more demand on health care resources will strain budgets and harm the quality of care. Opinion polls often favor withholding health care subsidies from illegal immigrants, according to a review by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group seeking to stop illegal immigration.
But without affordable health insurance, advocates say unauthorized immigrants will continue to have health issues.
“With a growing undocumented immigrant population in Texas, our state legislators must be aware of and address this problem before it evolves into a health care crisis,” researchers warned in last year’s Baylor College of Medicine study on health care for undocumented immigrants.
