Global Courant 2023-04-13 15:01:24
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden will announce his administration is expanding options for Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act health insurance exchange hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought to the US illegal as childrenaccording to two US officials briefed on the matter.
The action will allow participants in the Obama era Deferred action for child arrivals program, or DACA, to access publicly funded health insurance programs. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter ahead of the formal announcement on Thursday.
The 2012 DACA initiative was designed to protect immigrants illegally brought to the US by their parents as young children from deportation and allow them to legally work in the country. However, the immigrants were still ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition of “lawful presence” in the US. That’s what Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services will try to change by the end of the month.
The White House action comes while the DACA program is in legal danger and the number of people eligible for the program is declining.
According to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, an estimated 580,000 people were still enrolled in DACA at the end of last year. That number is lower than in previous years. Court orders are currently preventing the US Department of Homeland Security from processing new applications. The DACA program has been mired in legal challenges for years, while Congress has been unable to reach consensus on broader immigration reforms.
DACA recipients can legally work and pay taxes, but they have no legal status and are denied many benefits available to U.S. citizens and foreigners residing in the U.S.
In recent years, millions of people in the US have signed up for Medicaid, the program that provides health care coverage for the poorest Americans, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The government increased federal grants to reduce the cost of plans in the Affordable Care Act marketplace. Last year, only 8% of Americans had no health insurance, according to HHS.
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But DACA recipients, as well as those in the country without documentation, are not allowed to participate in those federally funded programs. About half of the 20 million or so undocumented immigrants living in the US are uninsured research from the Kaiser Family Foundation.
While there is bipartisan support for introducing some form of protection for the immigrants, negotiations have often failed due to debates over border security and whether an extension of protection could lead others to enter the US without permission. Biden, a Democrat, has repeatedly called on Congress to provide a path to citizenship for immigrants illegally brought to the US as children.
Other classes of immigrants – including asylum seekers and those with temporary protected status — are already eligible to purchase insurance through the marketplaces of the ACA, former President Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare bill often referred to as “Obamacare.”
