Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
because health care is a human right.
Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
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Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#22Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
Because it's the compassionate thing to do? Also because it's much cheaper.
It would be compassionate of these illegal immigrants to improve their own countries instead of using resources in the next country.
Another way to resolve the cost might be to fine companies that hire illegal immigrants or to send bills / decrease funding (although I don't think CA sends any funding overseas) to countries that have illegal immigrants here.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if we could pay citizens fair market price for their labor we wouldn't have to rely on illegal immigrants.
how many citizens and legal migrants do you know are going to work in backbreaking conditions picking the food you eat for minimum wage? Cheap robots haven't caught up yet to pick and grow everything we need. Also note that not everyone can pay whole food prices
If they got paid a living wage to do it with reasonable hours? A huge number. Would that mean food would get more expensive? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#24Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
Because the alternative is hospitals treating them anyway and sending out bills that will never get paid - ultimately costing society even more. Unless you actually think illegal immigrants should just be left to die when they have medical issues? I sure hope not.
if so, why should any patient pay the bill to the hospital?
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if we could pay citizens fair market price for their labor we wouldn't have to rely on illegal immigrants.
how many citizens and legal migrants do you know are going to work in backbreaking conditions picking the food you eat for minimum wage? Cheap robots haven't caught up yet to pick and grow everything we need. Also note that not everyone can pay whole food prices
OP said "market price for their labor", not minimum wage. If there is no one willing to do the labor for minimum wage, then minimum wage is not the market price for that labor. When you can't afford to pay necessary labor costs for a product, the answer isn't to go to the black market.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#26Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
Because the alternative is hospitals treating them anyway and sending out bills that will never get paid - ultimately costing society even more. Unless you actually think illegal immigrants should just be left to die when they have medical issues? I sure hope not.
The alternatives are sending them home - or - giving them citizenship.
Suppose you do the later - whoops (!) - as soon as the workers are citizens, and employers have to pay full benefits, and worry about unions ... then they'll dump such new citizens and hire actual illegal workers!
Point being: the price of that cheap labour is a function of their illegal status more than anything.
It's a false dynamic.
Just enforce basic laws. Americans will do many of those jobs for higher wages, the jobs that can't support higher wages will leave for Mexico and help them out down there, even in that scenario, surpluses come back to the US as well.
The real 'long term' answer is just to enforce basic citizenship and employment laws.
The answer on healthcare is much more complicated, but probably has more to do with regulating prices etc. than it does expanding medicare/medicaid, which is actually very inefficient compared to other nations, because prices are so high.
Single payer, as someone below mentioned, gives the gov the power to negotiate better deals, but you don't necessarily need single payer for that.
I'm generally against any kind of real socialization because it always ends up a mess, but in healthcare it seems it's going to be needed to stop the '100 aspirin' problem, among others.
More medicare just means more '$100 aspirin' unless it's combined with some other, heavier kind of action.
I hope it works out.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if we could pay citizens fair market price for their labor we wouldn't have to rely on illegal immigrants.
how many citizens and legal migrants do you know are going to work in backbreaking conditions picking the food you eat for minimum wage? Cheap robots haven't caught up yet to pick and grow everything we need. Also note that not everyone can pay whole food prices
Thank God for those illegal immigrants. Without them we would all have starved I guess.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because the alternative is hospitals treating them anyway and sending out bills that will never get paid - ultimately costing society even more. Unless you actually think illegal immigrants should just be left to die when they have medical issues? I sure hope not.
if so, why should any patient pay the bill to the hospital?
"never get paid" means: by the care recipient. obviously someone pays ... it's spread across all who do pay their bills.
and you should pay your bill because the hospital will sue you for it. it's only when the debt is finally uncollectible that it gets absorbed.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe if we could pay citizens fair market price for their labor we wouldn't have to rely on illegal immigrants.
how many citizens and legal migrants do you know are going to work in backbreaking conditions picking the food you eat for minimum wage? Cheap robots haven't caught up yet to pick and grow everything we need. Also note that not everyone can pay whole food prices
I’ve thought about this quite a bit. California min wage is $11/hour. Let’s say that the market rate for legal worker labor that’s going to work the fields is double that, that still seems like it’d be affordable.
It’s not like labor is 100% of the cost of produce. There’s seed, fertilizer, packaging, transport. I’d be surprised if labor was even 25% of the wholesale cost. Yes it’d be more expensive but I don’t think it’d be prohibitively so.
Re: Gov. Gavin Newsom proposes healthcare mandate, Medi-Cal expansion
#30Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
Does helping individuals with their healthcare improve society? Presumably any advocate of government healthcare programs would say that it does. If it does, then why would the legal status of each individual affect the societal improvement?
You can look at developed countries that do provide healthcare to individuals, who across the board have lower murder rates and violent crime than the US.
It's easy to answer your question, just look outside your own borders.