This bill will prevent people who have a
legitimate right to healthcare from accessing it and will harm them,
and it is for reasons that are completely unjustified. Currently, taxpayers must provide a Social Security number or tax
I.D. number in order to qualify for a premium tax credit for
healthcare. While the taxpayer's citizenship and immigration status are
verified, they are given a 90-day grace period in which to prove their
legal status. This grace period was put into place to ensure that people do not
lose critical healthcare coverage and continue to have it while their
paperwork is cleared. This bill would remove this safeguard and make it
more difficult for numerous people to obtain health insurance. That
could be a matter of life or death. This bill would certainly create barriers for immigrants who are here
legally. It would also create barriers for U.S. citizens who have
complications with their Social Security numbers. This includes people
who recently change their name after marriage, have an error in their
records, were born abroad, or were victims of human trafficking. It
would also affect newborns, who do not get their Social Security number
right away. Republicans claim that reports released by the GAO and the Senate
Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee were proof of
immigrants defrauding the government, but neither of these reports back
up this claim. First of all, the GAO report was actually a test to identify
vulnerabilities
for fraud in the system. They did not find instances of immigrants
committing fraud for healthcare subsidies. The Senate report found that
500,000 individuals did not complete their verification process and
were, thus, deemed ineligible for subsidies. The author of today's bill takes this information and leaps to the
conclusion that all those who did not complete the process were
undocumented immigrants and were attempting to commit fraud, but there
is nothing in either report to substantiate this. In fact, the ACA
requires undocumented immigrants or anybody who does receive subsidies
in error to pay back every cent on their tax return at the end of the
year. This bill seeks to address a problem that does not exist. Instead, it
would harm people by denying or delaying health insurance subsidies to
people who need them.
Keywords matched
immigration undocumented immigrants