Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) wrote Thursday that President Joe Biden’s plan to grant DACA illegal aliens access to Medicaid and Obamacare exchanges is an “insult to American citizenship.”
Biden announced an expansion for hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program aliens to access government-funded health insurance.
“Today, my Administration is announcing our plan to expand health coverage for Dreamers, the thousands of young people brought to the U.S. as kids. We’re not done fighting for their pathway to citizenship, but we’re getting them the opportunities they deserve in the meantime,” Biden wrote.
This enraged Cotton, who said that it undermines the benefits of being an American.
He wrote, “Rewarding illegal immigration will bring more illegal immigration. This is an insult to American citizenship.”
The Associated Press noted that millions of illegal aliens in the United States do not have health insurance, making this Biden move a significant expansion of Medicaid and Obamacare:
But immigrants living in the U.S. without documentation are far more likely than others to not have health insurance. More than a third of DACA recipients are estimated to be without health care coverage, HHS said. About half of the roughly 20 million immigrants who are living in the U.S. without documentation are uninsured, according to research from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
This serves as a dramatic change from current health care law considering that Obamacare explicitly denied prioritizing illegal aliens over Americans.
“The Federal health insurance exchange website is clear on this issue, it reads: ‘Undocumented immigrants aren’t eligible to buy Marketplace health coverage, or for premium tax credits and other savings on Marketplace plans,” Reps. Ken Buck (R-CO), Doug Lamborn (R-CO), and Lauren Boebert (R-CO) noted in May 2022 as Colorado moved to allow the state to use federal pass-through funding under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to offer healthcare coverage to illegal aliens.
As Obama made a late-stage push for the passage of Obamacare in 2009 during his State of the Union address, he claimed that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for coverage.
This led Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) to scream “You lie!” during the State of the Union.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.