Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell encouraged families with mixed immigration status to sign up for Obamacare to see whether they could get subsidies for purchasing health insurance.
Burwell made her remarks during a Google hangout with bloggers to promote Obamacare to Hispanics, discovered by Red Alert Politics reporter Ashley Dobson.
“With regards to the issue of mixed families, absolutely, mixed families should come. They should seek, try, go on the site,” Burwell said, adding, “They’ll find out they can get financial assistance. They may be eligible for different programs for their children or themselves, depending on which members of their family, in terms of what is mixed.”
“So everyone should come on, and folks should not be scared because … no questions will be asked. This is not about an immigration issue.”
According to the National Immigration Law Center, illegal immigrants are allowed to apply for benefits on behalf of eligible members of their families. Those individuals “are not required to provide information about their citizenship or immigration status and are not required to provide a Social Security number (SSN) if one was not issued to them.”
That allows illegal immigrants to apply for health insurance for their children who were born in the United States.
Burwell also reminded the audience that DREAMers currently were not covered by the Obamacare exchanges because of an immigration issue — something that the Obama administration was working to fix.
“I think everyone probably knows that this administration feels incredibly strongly about the fact that we need to fix that,” Burwell said. “We need to reform the system and make the changes that we need that will lead to benefits in everything from health care to economics to so many things — a very important step that we need to take as a nation.”