They use budget gimmicks to say that their bill is balance and paid for through higher cigarette taxes. The Heritage Foundation has estimated that the amount of money Democrats estimate they will raise from higher cigarette taxes comes up billions of dollars short and that over the next 10 years they will have to find 22 million new smokers to bring in the amount of cigarette tax revenue they hope to raise. (It is also noteworthy that lowerincome Americans pay a higher percentage of cigarette taxes. but it is middleincome Americans that will receive most of the expanded SCHIP benefits under this bill.) I am also concerned over provisions included in the bill that repeal the requirement that individuals must prove citizenship in order to enroll in Medicaid and SCHIP. This opens the program to fraud and the enrollment of illegal immigrants. In 2006. the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Health and Human Services found that 46 states allowed anyone seeking Medicaid or SCHIP to simply state they were citizens. The IG found that 27 states never sought to verify that enrollees were indeed citizens.
Keywords matched
illegal immigrants