WASHINGTON.-Approximately 100,000 immigrants who came to the United States as children are expected to enroll in Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) health insurance next year under a new directive that the President Joe Biden’s administration announced on Friday.
The measure took longer than promised to come to fruition and fell short of Biden’s initial proposal to allow those immigrants to enroll in Medicaid, the health insurance program that provides nearly free coverage to the country’s poorest people.
But it will allow thousands of immigrants to access lucrative tax breaks when they sign up for coverage once enrollment in the Affordable Care Act marketplace opens on Nov. 1, just days before the presidential election.
While it may help Biden improve his standing at a crucial time among Latinos, a crucial voting bloc that Biden needs to win the election, the move is sure to spark more criticism among conservatives about the president’s border and immigration policies.
The decision opens the insurance market to any participant in the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, many of whom are Latino.
Xavier Becerra, the country’s top health official, said Thursday that many of those migrants have delayed receiving medical care because they have not had coverage.
“They incur higher costs and debt when they finally receive care,” Becerra told reporters in a phone call. “Making Dreamers eligible to enroll in coverage will improve their health and well-being and strengthen the health and well-being of our nation and our economy.”
The federal government’s action changes the definition of “lawfully present” so that DACA participants can legally enroll in the exchange market.
Then-President Obama launched the DACA initiative to protect immigrants who came to the United States illegally with their parents as children from deportation and to allow them to work legally in the country. However, immigrants, also known as “dreamers,” were still ineligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the requirement of having a “legal presence” in the United States.
The federal government decided not to expand Medicaid eligibility for those immigrants after receiving more than 20,000 comments on the proposal, senior officials said Thursday. Officials declined to explain why the rule, which was first proposed last April, took so long to come to fruition. The delay meant immigrants were unable to enroll in the marketplace for coverage this year.
More than 800,000 of the immigrants will be eligible to sign up for marketplace coverage, but the U.S. government predicts that only 100,000 will sign up because some can get coverage through their workplace or other ways. Some may also not be able to afford coverage through the marketplace.
Other classes of immigrants, including asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status, are already eligible to buy insurance through the Affordable Care Act marketplaces, Obama’s 2010 health care law often called “Obamacare.”
Source: With information from AP
