California’s health care exchange is requesting that it be allowed a waiver from ObamaCare regulations in order to allow illegal immigrants to buy insurance...
In a Sept. 30 letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell, Covered California’s Executive Director Peter Lee said that the Affordable Care Act has been “tremendously successful”... and has cut the rate of uninsured in half.
“While millions of Californians have benefitted from coverage purchased through the Covered California marketplace, certain individuals are prohibited from buying insurance...due to their immigration status,” Lee wrote...
The Affordable Care Act technically bars illegal immigrants from insurance exchanges, but...Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill that allowed the state to apply for a federal waiver to open Covered California to illegal immigrants... The bill’s sponsor said such a waiver would allow 390,000 illegal immigrants to receive health insurance...
The Department for Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment...
Critics have objected to the plan, saying it is the latest sign the federal government misrepresented the purpose of the law.
“This is the first step in another misrepresentation of the Affordable Care Act,” Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform told US News & World Report in June. “It was sold to the American people on the fact that you wouldn’t have to subsidize health care for illegal immigrants.”
The issue of whether ObamaCare would be available to illegal immigrants was highly contentious in the debate building up to the law’s passage in 2010. In an address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, the president said ObamaCare would not apply to illegal immigrants, to which Rep. Joe Wilson, R-S.C. shouted “You lie!” Obama immediately responded, “That’s not true. That's not true"
Wilson was heavily criticized...and later apologized.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
