President Joe Biden plans to expand Obamacare to about 100,000 illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
The so-called ‘Dreamers’, which are registered for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, is expected to register next year for the health insurance policy of the Afforidable Care Act on the basis of a directive released on Friday.
The move took longer than promised to complete and fell short of Biden’s original proposal to allow those migrants to sign up for Medicaid, the health insurance program that provides virtually free coverage to the nation’s poor.
The campaign of former President Donald Trump soon denounced this step and called it harmful to ‘black Americans, Latin American Americans and trade union workers’ who saw how their jobs and public resources were stolen by people who entered our country illegally.
‘Thanks to Bidenomics, inflation continues to rise, job growth slows down, unemployment is at the highest level in two years and more employees born abroad are joining the labor force than native Dutch. Yet Joe Biden continues to force hard-working, tax-paying and struggling Americans to pay for housing, social services and now also health care for illegal immigrants, “said Karoline Leavitt, press secretary of the Trump campaign.
“I am proud of the contributions of Dreamers to our country and want to offer Dreamers the support they need to succeed,” the President said in a statement on Friday.
The action of the administration changes the definition of ‘legally present’, so that DACA participants can legally register for the marketplace exchange.
Then-President Barack Obama launched the DACA initiative to protect immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children from deportation and allow them to work in the country legally.
The ‘Dreamers’, however, still were not eligible for health insurance programs subsidized by the government, because they did not meet the definition of a ‘legal presence’ in the US.
The administration decided not to expand access to Medicaid for these migrants after receiving more than 20,000 responses to the proposal, senior officials said Thursday.
These officials declined to explain why the rule
The delay prevented migrants from registering with the marketplace for coverage this year.
Some may also not be able to afford coverage through the marketplace.
Temporary protected statusare already eligible to buy insurance through the marketplaces of the ACA, Obama’s 2010 health care law.