The health care debate has become a shoving match, and immigrants, legal and otherwise, are being pushed the hardest. President Obama’s admission that immigration reform will have to wait until next year further fueled fears that, while one-fifth of the 45 million uninsured are immigrants, health reform benefits will not cover them.

   “We are critically concerned,” Jennifer Ng’andu , who heads the Nationl Council of La Raza’s health policy project, told Hispanic Link News Service. “There are no current provisions extending public benefits to undocumented immigrants, and now legal immigrants are in danger of losing some benefits.”

   Obama told Hispanic Link columnist José de la Isla and other Latino correspondents that the animosity around both issues will be tough to overcome at present time.  “I think that, with respect to the debate that's taking place around health care reform now, it is not going to be possible to provide coverage for undocumented workers,” he said, noting that health coverage had already been extended to 11 million children including undocumented ones. “That was a fight that had been out there for a decade. And it was a huge accomplishment.”  

   A weeks-long battle for public support of proposed reform has intensified as members of Congress have faced tough crowds peppered with hostile shouting and pushing matches at “town hall” meetings across the country. Many detractors have made it clear they do not like “Obama’s plan” because he is a “socialist.”

   Encouraged by such groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Libertarian political party and rabidly right-wing talk radio hosts, the outrage and outbursts at these meetings are part of an opposition strategy to disrupt the administration’s message. Comprehensive care supporters have reacted by sending their own members to counter.

   Immigration has been thrown into the fray as nativist groups, such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform lobby vigorously for exclusion of  “illegal aliens.”

“Including them under the plan is unwarranted and would add billions to the price tag,” claimed FAIR president Dan Stein. “In Pennsylvania and all across the nation, the public is understandably upset about the staggering costs of illegal immigration and adamantly opposes providing a full range of health benefits to illegal aliens.”

   NCLR’s Ng’andu challenged the notion that immigrants, legal or otherwise, do not pay taxes. “Immigrants pay taxes like everyone else. Everyone should be integrated and everyone should share in the responsibility.”

   These hot-button issues intersect beyond 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. While Massachusett’s Commonwealth Care program has become a reform model, the state legislature voted last month to stop covering documented immigrants with fewer than five years on their green card —all 30,000 of them.

   Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who switched registration from Republican to Democrat earlier this year, has said he will not support health legislation that covers undocumented immigrants. In the past Specter has supported path-to-citizenship legislation, but assured a rowdy crowd at an Aug. 12 town hall meeting in Lebanon, Pa., that "none of the bills in Congress would provide health insurance to illegal immigrants."

   In California, with its nation-leading immigrant population, the health care and immigration debates have always been intertwined. In February of this year, several counties, including heavily Latino Sacramento County, began to cut non-emergency care to the undocumented, citing financial restraints.

   The pro-immigrant Immigration Policy Center charges that the issue is being used “as a way to jam a stick into the wheels of impending reform.”

   Obama reacts, “When it comes to legal immigrants, then my attitude is that, in the same way the Children's Health Insurance Program made sense, we should try to provide assistance and help for those who are here legally. We don't want children, or their parents for that matter, to be on a playground with tuberculosis and not have access to any health care services.  

   (Erick Galindo is a reporter with Hispanic Link News Service in Washington, D.C.   Email: [email protected])

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