Rebuking Mr. WilsonFollow

Except there was no evidence that people without legal immigration status were accessing medicaid in a substantial way. There is an assumption of abuse of many entitlement programs and government aid but there just isn't much research data supporting that assumption. It's the same with the fears of multiple generations being on welfare. There isn't much evidence that many people on welfare stay on for their whole adult life and generations of a family remain dependent on the system--but it's part of the mythology and so things like TANF were created, responding to an imagined issue, but not based on any real numbers or statistics.

These assumptions make for bad policy making that is more about empty rhetoric than actually discussing real abuses in the system.

You say that you "know" that immigrants are abusing the health care system. You don't know. You have unsubstantiated suspicions that they are. You can't base policy decisions on what you think you know but can't offer any proof of it occurring in any significant way.


Edited, Sep 16th 2009 8:41pm by Annabella

No. It's broken legislation. The norm when handing out free stuff is that people will lie to get it. This means that any legislation which hands out free stuff must include both rules defining who should receive it, and a mechanism for ensuring that those rules are followed.


Saying: "We're going to give out free lunches, but not to anyone who can afford their own lunch" with no provision to define that criteria or mechanisms to determine who meets it is the same as saying "We're going to give out free lunches to everyone who walks up and says they need it". Absent any mechanism to determine qualification, then everyone qualifies.


Putting a single line in saying "only people working here legally get these benefits" is meaningless if there is no mechanism for determining if someone is working here legally. As I pointed out in the other thread, when last the conservatives attempted to do something as simple as cross reference social security numbers on W-4 forms with the names in the social security database to give some kind of starting point to finding people working here illegally, it was met with resounding cries of racism and anti-immigrant.

If we're unwilling to do something that simple and obvious to check to see if someone's working, two pieces of information the government already has and which require not a single additional intrusion into anyone's privacy, it's ridiculous to even speculate that any alternative mechanism will be put in place. The language is there just to point to and say it's there. Everyone knows that not only will it not be enforced, but any attempt to enforce it will be strongly opposed by the same party which is insisting that the language is sufficient and we shouldn't worry about it.


It's broken legislation.



It's not the potential for fraud. It's a guarantee of fraud. That's the problem.




I'm not sure what you're asking. Right now, if you are an illegal immigrant, you just make up a social security number and say you're a citizen and it's almost impossible for the employer to know if you're lying or not. This is part of why this is such a hot issue for conservatives. We've been down this road already with existing laws. Sure. On paper, it's illegal to hire someone who isn't here legally, and it's illegal for any government agency to give benefits to someone who isn't here legally. We have rules saying they can't get jobs and benefits, but without enforcement, they are meaningless. And when conservatives bring this up, the liberals just point to the laws and insist that it's illegal so what can they do?


Um... We have an opportunity to *not* lump yet another benefit out there with no way to restrict it. So conservatives are taking the "we're not going to let you lie to us again" approach. We're not going to fall for the "But it says right there that illegals can't get this!" bit. That language clearly doesn't work with existing benefits, so it'll clearly not work with this. Pretending that it will is deceptive at the very least...

None? Or you just didn't bother to check, so there's none you have personally seen?

I'm going to go to the far end of the political dial here and link a FactCheck.org page. This page is specifically refuting far inflated claims about the cost of illegal immigrants. In the midst of the claims, is one stating that illegal immigrants account for 2.5 Billion dollars in medicaid. Factcheck confirms that this matches the CIS numbers, and does not refute them except to state that most of this is to cover costs for US born children of illegal immigrants (a whole controversy by itself IMO).

Um... Regardless of why, it's still clear that there is a cost to medicaid as a result of our lax immigration enforcement and it's not tiny.




There's lots of research, but it's usually just dismissed out of hand by those with a political agenda which does not benefit from it.


I'm more than willing to acknowledge that there's politics involved on both sides of this. Can you?



And why don't we "know"?

How about you go write your congressman and senators and insist that they allow for actual auditing of social security numbers to determine how many people are working illegally? Then insist that they correlate those numbers to medicaid claims as well? If you demand such numbers first, then surely you'd support measures to collect them, right?

The reason we don't know, and the reason there is so little data is because politicians on the Left have successfully blocked any attempt to collect that data and correlate them. Using that lack of data to argue that they must be right should be laughable.


If there's a lack of data, then we shouldn't do anything which makes assumptions about the data, right? Maybe it's the conservative in me, but to me this means that we should not pass health care legislation which assumes that the benefits we're creating would not be abused unless we can show that they wont. A lack of data means we don't pass the proposed new benefits.


Your "side" needs to prove their case, not insist that we should do what they want to do because we can't prove it's a bad idea. That's kind of a backwards way of doing things, don't you agree? The default should be to do nothing and make no changes. If you want to propose a change, you need to prove that the change you want to make is a good one. And you need to have the numbers to do that.

You're linking a third party?! That's a sign of lesser intelligence! For shame.

For numbers, names, dates, etc? Absolutely. I said as much earlier.

You get that ideas are different than quantitative values, right? I don't just point to a site which makes the same argument I'm making and say that I'm right because this site agrees with me. Just as I didn't in this case.


And I picked a site I view as biased in the liberal direction specifically to avoid someone saying I was cherry picking the data.

I've noticed that you have issues with light-hearted comments. You also tend to seem like a douchebag when you try to make light-hearted comments. You just aren't a fun person.

Then please hold off on claiming that you already have done so.



Yes. I said that in my post. I also pointed out that this touches a much larger issue that's somewhat out of the scope of this particular discussion. One can argue that if we had more strict immigration enforcement, these children would not be born in the US, and would not be costing us that 2.5 Billion dollars. One can also argue that if our immigration laws did not have a loophole which allowed someone to enter the US illegally, have a child there, and grant the child automatic US citizenship and thereby allow the illegal immigrant the right to stay here in some kind of nebulous limbo status due to the desire not to separate children from parents, we'd also not incur that 2.5 Billion dollar cost.


Many conservatives view that as a problem with our immigration laws, so arguing that this 2.5 Billion doesn't count because it's spent as a result of said loophole doesn't really carry much weight with them. To a conservative, this is still money we're spending for someone who is here illegally. I'll fully acknowledge that this is a complex issue and not as simplistic as it seems, but it would be nice if you'd acknowledge that this does not mean we get to pretend that the money being spent isn't actually costing us anything.

Also, "most of" is not a quantitative figure, is it?


The point I was going after was that factcheck did not refute the dollar amount. That they excuse it after the fact and in a way which most conservatives don't believe constitutes a valid excuse is spin and/or bias on their own part and in no way changes the "facts" of the issue. If you believe that it's ok to spend 2.5 Billion for medical care for children born in the US to illegal immigrants, then you'll be fine with that explanation. If you don't, you wont. Thus, that assessment is purely subjective.


The 2.5B number is *not*. You said that there "was no evidence that people without legal immigration status were accessing medicaid in a substantial way".

The children are minors. Their parents are the ones "accessing medicaid". They are here illegally. Just because we allow this nebulous legal status to exist does not mean we can just ignore the costs that result. The children aren't the ones filling out the forms. The parents are.




Some of us consider it fraudulent to enter the US illegally, pop out a baby, and use it as a ticket to get free services and bypass the normal immigration process. Some of us think that this part of our immigration law should be changed. And, more relevant to this discussion, it's a stunning example of yet another process in which the law says that something is illegal, but does not adequately prevent people from using loopholes in said law to avoid it.


It's relevant because the same political forces in our country which prevent us from closing said loopholes, or at least codifying them in some legal manner, will undoubtably also prevent us from closing the loopholes in the proposed legislation. It absolutely calls into question the insistence by those on the Left that we don't need to define how we're going to prevent illegal immigrants from receiving free health care because somehow just because we said it's illegal for them to receive it, it wont happen anyway...


Sorry. I think that's wishful thinking. Actually, that's not correct. I believe wholeheartedly that those pushing this agenda know darn well that it wont be enforced but know that this benefits them politically to leave said loopholes open. They're banking on it and using the "but it says it's illegal" as cover for what we all know will happen.

Edited, Sep 16th 2009 9:08pm by gbaji

You mean "citizens", right? Because we have a word for children born in the United States. They're called "citizens".

Yeah, I think it's fine to spend $2.5 billion for medical care for citizens. Hell, make it $2.6 billion. I'm feelin' charitable.

If you're a nihilist or hate people, I agree.

Now aside from that gbaji, your recent understanding of induction hasn't been super awesome, with that whole acorn thing, and the trend seems to continue here, considering what you think burden of proof is.