Last night, Lou Dobbs Show correspondent Lisa Sylvester reported that “people who break immigration laws” will be “rewarded” with free health care coverage due to “gaping loopholes” in the proposed health care bill. Sylvester interviewed right-wing immigration hardliners and health care opponents to make her case:

ROBERT RECTOR, HERITAGE FOUNDATION: What we’re doing is creating a new program for low-income people to give them free medical care and giving illegal immigrants free and total access to that system. It’s a huge transformation. It’s radically different than anything the country has done in the past.

SYLVESTER: An amendment was offered that would have enabled states to use the Welfare Eligibility data base to keep illegal immigrants from qualifying for health care benefits. But that amendment was defeated in committee on a party line vote. And there’s another provision in this bill that some Republicans take issue with. It says that if one member of a family is eligible to receive universal health coverage then the entire family is eligible. Representative Lamar Smith calls that another loophole that he says will permit illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer funded health coverage.

Watch it:

Far from “free and total access,” there is specific language in both the House and Senate bills that prohibits undocumented immigrants from obtaining any federal health care assistance. However, several conservatives are still whining about the failure of the Heller Amendment, which Sylvester also cites above. None of them have mentioned that the amendment would have given private insurance providers unprecedented access to the sensitive income and identity information of all those applying for health care assistance while curtailing the privacy and redress responsibilities that the Social Security Act requires of government agencies.

The second “loophole” that Smith falsely claims will allow undocumented immigrants to receive universal coverage through legal family members represents another distortion. The House bill clearly stipulates that only family members who are “affordable credit eligible individuals” will receive government assistance. “Affordable credit eligible individuals” are defined as someone who is lawfully present in the US.

Rather than requiring Americans to hand over sensitive information to private insurers, the eligibility provision is enforceable via less invasive documentation requirements. If Congress decides to take up comprehensive immigration reform, there’s also the likely possibility that illegal immigration will be addressed head-on by putting undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization which is when and how this whole topic should be addressed in the first place.

It seems that Michael Gerson is trying really hard to miss the larger picture when it comes to President Obama’s engagement strategy, which Gerson claims “is on its deathbed.” Pointing to Obama’s failure — a full six months after taking office — to cause North Korea and Iran to completely surrender their nuclear aspirations, throw open their facilities to international inspections, and apply for U.S. statehood, Gerson proceeds directly to autopsy, writing that “the problem is not engagement itself — which was, after all, attempted in various forms by the previous administration.”

The difficulty is that the Obama foreign policy team has often argued that the reason for tension and conflict with nations such as North Korea and Iran is a lack of adequate American engagement — which is absurd, and which has raised absurdly high expectations. [...]

Fists remain clenched. This is not because some magical diplomatic words remain unspoken. It is because of the nature of oppressive regimes themselves.

Such regimes are often internally preoccupied. Precisely because they lack genuine legitimacy, they spend large amounts of time and effort maintaining their fragile authority, consolidating power and managing undemocratic transitions. North Korea confronts a succession crisis. Iran deals with growing dissent and clerical division. Both tend to make calculations based on internal power struggles, not some rational calculation of their external image and interests. They are so inwardly focused that they do not have, as Clinton said, “any capacity” to respond to engagement. It is questionable in these cases whether we currently have any serious negotiating partners at all.

While it’s pretty funny to read Gerson blaming Obama for raising “absurdly high expectations” after he’s just failed him for not transforming the world in six months, there are actually some serious problems here.

The first is this idea, which is becoming more common on the right, that the Bush administration already tried engagement, and it didn’t work, so we shouldn’t expect it to work now. I responded to AEI’s Michael Rubin on this point in an exchange about Iran on the LA Times website, noting that, while the claim is “perhaps true if one simply tallies up the number of contacts and communications between the two governments, I think it does some injustice to the sort of good-faith attempt to change the U.S.-Iran relationship that many of us in the “pro-engagement crowd” would like to see undertaken. The nature of the engagement and the larger foreign policy context within which that engagement occurs are important.”

Engagement involves more than just an offer to talk — it requires a range of signals to indicate that one is serious about reaching an accord. Given Bush’s addiction to tough-guy posturing, it’s no mystery why the Iranians didn’t take his offers of engagement, such as they were, very seriously.

Another problem has to do with treating North Korea and Iran the same. While both are regimes that pose huge challenges to the United States, the similarity pretty much ends there. All oppressive regimes are not oppressive in the same way. While Iran is certainly oppressive, life in Iran is nothing like that in North Korea, for whom “Orwellian” would represent a kind of glasnost. As we’ve seen over the last month and a half, political speech exists and public opinion is registered in Iran in a way that is unimaginable in North Korea.

And that brings us to the most important point that Gerson misses in regard to the “growing dissent and clerical division” that he recognizes is occurring in Iran. While we shouldn’t pretend that the Iranian elections were a referendum on Obama, I do think it’s fair to see the elections as something a referendum on greater Iranian engagement with the United States and the world. In this respect, Obama’s clear message of reconciliation played a significant part in Iran’s internal politics, empowering reformers seeking an end to Iran’s international isolation and undercutting hardline propaganda about the Great Satan. This represented an enormous threat to Iran’s conservatives, who responded accordingly. Read more