During Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s contentious Senate confirmation hearing as HHS secretary nominee, he revealed that Medicaid costs blew out by a staggering 60% during Joe Biden’s presidency.
“Our ship is sinking. Our 60% increase in Medicaid over the past four years is the biggest budget line now, and it’s growing faster than any other.”
Biden’s border invasion is what happened over the past four years.
It stands to reason that if you have an extra 10 to 20 million new potential low-income patients, none of whom has contributed a penny in net taxes, you will get a blowout in Medicaid and Medicare costs.
This is the dirty little secret that the Biden administration and their minions in the “fact-checking” business have been busy denying.
But talk to doctors who have worked near the border, and they will tell you illegal aliens get unlimited taxpayer-funded health care, and many have serious health problems.
“Ask me how many of my pregnant patients who are illegals have Medicaid?” said a doctor I know who worked for two years at hospitals in Arizona, New Mexico and west Texas, and wishes to remain anonymous.
“100%.”
Bonus for disability
Most of these patients, he says, are also on some form of disability benefit, such as Supplemental Security Income, which is intended for low-income aged, blind or disabled US citizens.
Obesity, hypertension and adjustment disorders are among the most common reasons for the extra benefit, although one young woman he saw had a disability attributed to a car crash in Texas in which she was involved while crossing the border.
“They don’t speak the language so now it takes me, on average, an extra 15 minutes per patient trying to speak with them through a translator. Guess who pays for the translation services?” the doc said.
The taxpayer, of course.
“Every illegal jumping the border in Arizona and New Mexico was given an envelope with documents for health care, food stamps and $2,200 in cash, all part of their transit papers. Their first stop after getting this envelope was either Walmart or the emergency room.”
He says Customs and Border Protection would provide them with “vouchers from the federal government on an individual basis to cover the health care . . . They had a group number and policy number that was [meant to be] for federal employees’ health insurance . . . That would default back to Medicare.”
The hospital would send any additional bills back to the Department of Homeland Security.
One hospital he worked at made a $220,000 profit in the OB-GYN department compared to previous years of chronic losses because the guaranteed government payments were so lucrative.
The cost of the “free” health care is astronomical.
He treated one illegal migrant from Honduras who crossed the border while in labor and delivered a baby with severe congenital defects.
Mother and baby had to be medevac’ed to Tucson, Ariz., for multiple surgeries at a cost he estimates as in excess of $1 million.
The child survived, thankfully, but America is simply unable to provide expensive health care to every sick person in the world.
There have to be limits or the ship, as Kennedy said, is sunk.
Hosp-care crossers
Yet, as my doctor source says, he saw illegal migrants with chronic illnesses who had specifically crossed the border for cutting-edge health care, while American citizens who pay taxes and insurance have to wait in ever-longer lines.
One American patient, the pregnant wife of a local rancher, came to his hospital with preeclampsia and dangerously high blood pressure of 220/120, which is classified as a hypertensive emergency, risking the sudden death of mother and child.
She sat in the triage area of the emergency room behind three illegal migrants for a wait that would have been more than three hours except that the doctor spotted the problem and intervened to save her and her baby, only to be reprimanded later for jumping the line.
The burden on finite health resources is just one of the myriad problems caused by illegal migration, which includes child-sex trafficking and the importation of violent foreign criminals.
Yet the left is castigating President Trump for doing what he was elected to do — clean up Joe Biden’s mess — and lefties are pretending the US economy will collapse without taxpayer-subsidized slave labor.
Among the most vocal critics has been the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which slammed Trump’s executive orders on border protection and mass deportations, saying they are “unacceptable,” “appalling,” and “contrary to American and Christian values.”
Over in the Vatican, Pope Francis went further, describing the mass deportations as a “disgrace” that would make “the poor wretches, who have nothing, pay the bill of the inequalities” of the world.
Yet their view of free passage to America for the world’s poor as some unconditional entitlement is not soundly based in church teaching, as plenty of Catholics have pointed out.
The most high-profile of the dissenters is the influential Robert Cardinal Sarah, the Guinean former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship at the Vatican, who told Nico Spuntoni in the Italian newspaper Il Tempo this week: “As set up today, migration is a new form of slavery or human trafficking, as there is trafficking in arms.”
European ‘extinction’
Sarah, a close friend of the late Pope Benedict XVI, said Europe is facing “extinction, both culturally and demographically,” because it has strayed from its Christian roots.
But, “as an African man, I believe that the solution is not and cannot be the ‘ethnic replacement’ of uncontrolled immigration, which impoverishes African nations, leaving them without young men.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, a practicing Catholic convert, said he was “heartbroken” by the bishops’ criticism.
“The US Conference of Catholic Bishops needs to actually look in the mirror a little bit and recognize that when they receive over $100 million to help resettle illegal immigrants, are they worried about humanitarian concerns? Or are they actually worried about their bottom line? We’re going to enforce immigration law. We’re going to protect the American people, he told CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”
Vance was referring to taxpayer funding used by Catholic charities and other NGOs to help facilitate people smuggling across the border.
This was one of the main reasons for Trump’s freeze on federal grants this week, with the aim of aligning federal funding with administration priorities, especially on border security, DEI and climate policy.
America is the most generous country in the world.
But it’s no good to anyone if, as Kennedy warns, the whole ship sinks.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
