Big if true.Both those claims are empirical ones. I don't know whether they're true or not.
But, if they are, we should hope there'd be no disagreement about cutting these people off.
What's really crazy is that a significant sub-group of Democrats do disagree.
Strom writes:
Democrats are playing a verbal shell game, pointing to federal law to say that Medicaid dollars can't legally go to illegal aliens, so there is no money to be saved by cutting those funds off. At the same time, they are suing to hide the legal status of recipients to prevent them from facing ICE deportations--in other words, they are illegally spending Medicaid dollars for illegals and want to hide them from the feds.
If true, this doesn't exactly show that Dems don't want to cut off illegal Medicaid recipients, but just that they don't want Medicaid to be used to out them as illegal.
But this at least shows that they think it's better to pay benefits to illegals than to use Medicaid to reveal their status. And that comes to basically the same thing. There's no reason to think that Medicaid is special in this respect. Their real position is that we shouldn't use any means to reveal people's status as illegal. And, of course, no illegals (or virtually none, at least) should be deported. And, furthermore, they ought to receive Medicaid and other benefits. Let's not beat around the bush here. The fact that there's a narrow, winding justification for their position that doesn't exactly come down to open borders is just a distraction.
Once again, we have a Republican party that--whatever its flaws--has a set of sane, ordinary, long-standing, commonsense positions here: people should only come into the country legally; those who come in illegally should be deported; and they damn sure shouldn't get benefits like Medicaid.
The Dems, on the other hand, have gone so radical that--as I first noted nearly 20 years ago--their position is becoming more and more difficult to distinguish from open borders. Now, 20 years on, this could hardly be clearer: we must not stop them at the border, but once they're in the country, they cannot be removed. In fact, we shouldn't even seek to know whether someone is here legally or not. And from that it basically follows that they should have all the benefits of citizenship. If you don't believe that, consider the fact that some blue cities and states have made it legal for illegals to vote in local elections...
Remember also that slippery slope arguments are commonly sound against the left--it's part of their worldview that we should always be moving farther left. We see this dynamic in the debate over the status of non-heterosexuals and other sexual minorities. The started with the reasonable claim that we ought not discriminate against non-heterosexuals. And they were right about that, and conservatives were wrong. But we've been on a slippery slope since then, through same-sex marriage (which I generally supported/support)...then very rapidly to "women have penises," to the brainwashing and sexual mutilation of children, and to the re-engineering of society to bring it into alignment with this gender pseudoscience. And, of course, the left isn't done. They're already floating trial balloons about the next front in their assault on the status quo: normalizing (and legalizing) polygamous marriage, pedophilia, and even zoophilia...
A similar slippery slope has driven the left's positions on race. We went from Racism is bad to Racism is the founding principle of America, all whites are racist by definition, oh and there's no such thing as race...
Anyway. There's nothing worth arguing about here, IMO...other than the empirical claims. Anyone illicitly receiving government benefits should be kicked off the rolls.