You die! No health care for the undocumented

Meg Tirrell and Nicole Gaouette wrote Thursday for Bloomberg:

Illegal immigrants in the U.S. won’t gain insurance benefits under the proposed health-care overhaul that President Barack Obama described yesterday to Congress.

That may not stop some uninsured and undocumented U.S. residents from getting government help paying for their health care, Republican critics said. Current proposals lack enforcement provisions to ensure that ineligible applicants are kept from programs, causing a gap between law and practice, according to a group seeking curbs on immigration.

I’m not concerned that a congressman made an ass of himself yelling “you lie” at the President of the United States. The President is an adult, and a politician, and legislative heckling in this country was one of the necessary steps to opening the political system.  I am concerned that people believe medical workers should be checking immigration documents.

The most charitable assumption I can make is that people like Congressman Wilson expect medical workers to check one’s citizenship status before offering care…”Sir, we’ll deal with that sucking chest wound, as soon as we see your birth certificate”.

But, even if Mr. Wilson is a member of the same political party as Abraham Lincoln, his remark (and the boneheaded willingness of his political opponents to address this non-issue) was hardly made with “Charity towards all, and malice towards none.”  The reality is that Mr. Wilson would not expect to be asked for HIS papers… but he would expect health care workers to ask “those people.”

How a health care worker is supposed to identify “illegals” from others is left to the imagination.  We’ve seen American citizens held as “illegals” because they had a different regional accent (a guy from Brooklyn was arrested in Dallas), because they’re the wrong skin color in certain parts of the country, because they have a “Spanish accent”, or because… well… just because.

I have yet to see actually data proving “illegal aliens” use more public health services than other tax payers… they use the emergency rooms BECAUSE they don’t have health insurance… which would be cost effective to treat as illnesses before they ended up in emergency care.  And, given that “illegals” do so much of the type of work that leads to occupational illness (like farm workers) or accidents (meat cutters), they need insurance more than most.

For Wilson (and the spineless members of the other party that are willing to consider this objection… up to and including the President of the United States), there is no sense of recognition that the United States already has a lot of undocumented immigrants and that they are taxpayers, and that they don’t all “look Mexican”… only that they want these people to shut up, do their work, and die quietly.

What do they think?  If an “illegal” gets swine flu, you they think his germs are gonna apply for immigration before invading a citizen’s immune system?  Living in a normal country, where you just go to the doctor and get treated, or stand in line at the clinica, I have to admit I don’t understand any of this… even when I was an illegal alien here, no one thought of asking, nor would they ask if I had a right to be in the country.  They asked how I was feeling.

Besides, ratting out the patient to immigration authorities is not in the The Hippocratic Oath:

What I may see or hear in the course of treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men, which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep myself holding such things shameful to be spoken about.

Rep. Wilson, and those that pander to this nonsense, are Hypocritical Oafs.