A reminder from The Baltimore Sun that draconian measures taken against immigrants and noncitizens — whether we are talking about denial of rights or denial of benefits — always seem to come back to bite the least fortunate among us:
Just as feared, a hateful effort to prevent illegal immigrants from getting health care through Medicaid has taken its greatest toll instead on Americans.
Hundreds of thousands of needy people, many of them children, are believed to have been denied Medicaid coverage or dumped from the Medicaid rolls over the past year because they can’t produce the documents now required to prove eligibility, according to The Sun’s Gady A. Epstein.
The absurdity of this requirement played out in agonizing detail for Renell Francine Ray, a 50-year resident of West Baltimore, who lost her Medicaid benefits because she couldn’t get her birth certificate from Virginia without a valid state ID – and couldn’t get a valid state ID without her birth certificate.
Congress, with the most virulent anti-illegal-immigrant lawmakers no longer in control, should move quickly to repeal this outrage. It was a poorly crafted solution to a problem more fantasy than fact that hurt the people it was supposed to protect.
Doesn’t it always work out this way?
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Hank Kalet 