President Joe Biden is moving forward with a proposed federal rule to open Affordable Care Act benefits, known as Obamacare and subsidized by American taxpayers, to illegal aliens enrolled in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
This month, Biden announced a plan to open Obamacare and Medicaid rolls, both subsidized by American taxpayers, to nearly 600,000 illegal aliens currently enrolled in DACA — the program created by former President Obama, via executive order, that has shielded more than a million illegal aliens from deportation through the years.
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Xavier Becerra, whom Breitbart News reported has long sought to open taxpayer-funded healthcare benefits to illegal aliens, is overseeing the plan while Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Alejandro Mayorkas has said he hopes the plan leads to an amnesty for illegal aliens.
On Monday, Becerra issued the proposed rule, suggesting that HHS hopes to open Obamacare and Medicaid rolls to DACA illegal aliens by the beginning of November:
If this proposal is finalized, DACA recipients would be considered lawfully present for purposes of eligibility for these insurance affordability programs based on a grant of deferred action, just like other similarly situated noncitizens who are granted deferred action. [Emphasis added]
…
[Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’] target effective date for this rule is November 1, 2023, to ensure the provisions are effective during the Open Enrollment Period for individual market Exchanges, the next of which will begin on November 1, 2023. [Emphasis added]
Prior research has found that offering Obamacare to illegal aliens would cost American taxpayers about $4,600 per illegal alien. Such an estimate indicates that taxpayers could be charged about $2.8 billion every year to provide Obamacare to every DACA illegal alien in the U.S.
Already, American taxpayers are forced to subsidize at least $18.5 billion of annual medical costs for illegal aliens living in the United States, according to estimates by Chris Conover, formerly of the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University.
The move by Biden comes more than a decade after Obama vowed to American taxpayers that Obamacare would not be open to illegal aliens. Obama made that pledge in his 2012 State of the Union Address.
Rep. Joe Wilson (R-CA) famously shouted back at Obama, “You lie!”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.