U.S. Taxpayers Pay $18.5B a Year for Healthcare for Illegal Aliens

As 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates advocate having American taxpayers provide free health care for illegal aliens, U.S. citizens are already paying billions every year for the expenditure.

During the second night of debates for the 2020 Democrat presidential primary candidates, every Democrat — including Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Pete Buttigieg — said they supported having American taxpayers pay for free health care for all 11 to 22 million illegal aliens living in the country.

The latest research by Chris Conover from the Center for Health Policy and Inequalities Research at Duke University reveals that every year, American taxpayers pay nearly $20 billion for healthcare for illegal aliens.

Conover wrote the analysis in Forbes:

Current federal policy is to prohibit federal tax funding of health care to unauthorized immigrants through either Medicaid or Obamacare. Nevertheless, rough estimates suggest that the nation’s 3.9 million uninsured immigrants who are unauthorized likely receive about $4.6 billion in health services paid for by federal taxes, $2.8 billion in health services financed by state and local taxpayers, another $3.0 bankrolled through “cost-shifting” i.e., higher payments by insured patients to cover hospital uncompensated care losses, and roughly $1.5 billion in physician charity care. [Emphasis added]

In addition to these amounts, unauthorized immigrants likely benefit from at least $0.9 billion in implicit federal subsidies due to the tax exemption for nonprofit hospitals and another $5.7 billion in tax expenditures from the employer tax exclusion. [Emphasis added]

All told, Americans cross-subsidize health care for unauthorized immigrants to the tune of $18.5 billion a year. Of this total, federal taxpayers provided $11.2 billion in subsidized care to unauthorized immigrants in 2016. [Emphasis added]

Analysis conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) finds that American taxpayers are forced to federally subsidize about $17.14 billion every year in free medical coverage for illegal aliens and about $12.17 billion in state medical costs for illegal aliens.

On the federal level, Americans pay about $1.2 billion for illegal alien births through Medicaid, about $3.4 billion for annual Medicaid fraud by illegal aliens, and about $4.2 billion for Medicaid births by the U.S-born children of illegal aliens.

Every year, Americans are forced to pay about $116 billion in total expenses for the millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S.

Story cited here.

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