Health Care and Immigration

I’m not really sure how this came up, but it seems that earlier today Max Baucus (D-MT) said that undocumented immigrants are out of luck in terms of health care:

Baucus told the group that his plan would not cover illegal immigrants who are working in the U.S., which means hospitals would probably bear the cost of treating those in the country illegally.

“We’re not going to cover undocumented workers because that’s too politically explosive,” he said.

It’s a bit hard to disagree with Baucus on the “too politically explosive” front, but I think it’s worth dwelling for a moment on the fact that this is really too bad. I mean, human beings deserve health care when they’re sick. And like all uninsured Americans, undocumented immigrants who show up at emergency rooms with severe problems do, in fact, get treated. So insofar as congress has a good health care bill that can get people out of the emergency rooms and into preventive care, timely treatment for their problems, etc., there’s no really persuasive reason other than crass politics for keeping them out of the system. Conversely, adding a “citizenship monitoring” function to the health care system will pull funds and attention away from improving people’s health.

But all this is really mostly one more reason why we could use comprehensive immigration reform in this country. It’s unfortunate that every substantial social policy argument we undertake now needs to have a “how are you going to exclude undocumented immigrants?” component. And not just unfortunate, to some extent it’s paralyzing. Suppose some zealot proposals a bill to revoke the federal transportation funding from any state that allows undocumented immigrants to ride on its mass transit systems? Next thing you know, bus drivers are checking people’s green cards and nothing works.