Marta, the disabled and immigrants aren't mutually exclusive categories. Among those who have suffered every day due to Medicaid cuts are immigrants. As a matter of fact, the most drastic cut to Medicaid -- due to change in eligibility -- in recent history was inflicted on immigrants.
<blockquote>Immigrants and Medicaid After Welfare Reform
Immigrants—who comprise more than one in 10 U.S. residents—historically have faced an array of barriers to obtaining health care, such as poverty, language and cultural differences and, often, resentment. In 1996, Congress added a new impediment to the list when it denied most recent, poor legal immigrants the right to enroll in Medicaid. This policy change has important implications for the nearly nine million foreign-born women of reproductive age residing in the United States and the service providers who are trying to meet their health care needs.
By Rachel Benson Gold
More than 30 million residents of the United States—about 11% of the population—were born in other countries, according to recent estimates from The Urban Institute. Two-thirds of these immigrants are noncitizens, who are more likely than citizens to be poor, even if they work full-time. Although approximately 28% of immigrants are undocumented, either because they entered the country illegally or overstayed their visas, the overwhelming majority are legal U.S. residents.
Eligibility Changes
Historically, legal immigrants—whether citizens or noncitizens—generally were eligible for public benefit programs such as Medicaid on the same basis as were native-born Americans. This changed dramatically in 1996 when Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (popularly known as "welfare reform"). The legislation included provisions designed to ensure that most families already enrolled in Medicaid would continue to be covered and to permit additional poor families to enroll in the program even if they did not meet all of the new welfare requirements; however, that was not the case for most immigrants, even if they were in the United States legally.
A year later, Congress enacted the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), modeled on Medicaid. In doing so, it added similar but slightly more lenient eligibility restrictions for immigrant children— a population generally seen as having greater political appeal than adults. The policy parameters for covering immigrants under Medicaid and SCHIP are outlined in the box below.
[Omitted Here -- Click on the Link Below]
For Medicaid, Congress drew a distinction between immigrants who had entered the United States before welfare reform became law in August 1996 and those who arrived later. Welfare reform gave states the option to include individuals already here in 1996 in their Medicaid programs. (Under Medicaid, the federal government and the states share the cost of providing health care for specified groups of poor individuals considered to be unable to afford the cost of necessary medical care.) According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), all states except Wyoming have opted to do so.
Most legal immigrants who arrived after August 1996, however, were barred from Medicaid coverage for the first five years of residency, except in emergency situations. Although federal reimbursement is not available for this population, some states—including many that have the largest immigrant populations—have chosen to use their own funds to enroll and serve at least some groups of recent immigrants. According to CBPP, 18 states and the District of Columbia cover pregnant women in their programs; 13 states and the District of Columbia cover people with disabilities, families or seniors; and 17 states and the District of Columbia cover children. States have the option to offer Medicaid coverage to legal immigrants after five years of U.S. residency. All but nine states have chosen to provide coverage to this group, with the costs shared between the states and the federal government. <http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/06/2/gr060206.html></blockquote>
That's despite the fact that we DO pay taxes!!!
Here's the result of exclusion of recent immigrants from Medicaid:
<blockquote>TRENDS IN PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN 15-44 WHO ARE COVERED BY MEDICAID
Poor* Total
1994 2001 1994 2001 United States (total) 46.5 35.0 12.6 10.1 Native born 48.8 38.9 12.4 10.3 Immigrants (total) 36.0 20.6 14.8 9.0 Naturalized citizens 35.4 27.6 6.7 7.3 Noncitizens (total) 36.0 19.4 17.1 9.6 Long-standing residents** 41.1 23.2 17.3 10.5 Recent immigrants*** 25.6 15.3 16.4 8.3
<http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/tgr/06/2/gr060206.html></blockquote>
The Medicaid coverage of immigrants went down dramatically.
N.B. Cutting off HUGE numbers of immigrants didn't improve the conditions of the American born -- rather, the opposite is the case: their coverage shrank, too, though less dramatically than immigrants'.
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>