Is the government spending money on healthcare for undocumented immigrants?published at 16:41 BST
Bernd Debusmann Jr
Reporting from the White House
Question: What is the total federal dollar spending for illegal immigrants’ health? Lorenzo Valla
That’s an important question amid the shutdown and goes to the heart of Republican claims about what the Democrats want and, in their view, why the shutdown is happening.
Donald Trump, for example, has posted in the past that “Democrats want to give your healthcare money to illegal aliens” – a claim that is often repeated by other administration officials and senior Congressional Republicans.
But the reality is far more nuanced, and Republicans have provided little evidence to back these claims up.
Occasionally, some Republicans will point to a 2024 letter from the Congressional Budget Office which noted that $27m was spent by federal and state governments on emergency Medicaid over a seven-year period.
By most accounts, the bulk of that money, however, went to lawfully present immigrants, rather than undocumented.
Undocumented immigrants are already not eligible for federal healthcare schemes like Medicaid. But federal law mandates that hospitals give emergency assistance to anyone – regardless of their status in the US – for which they are reimbursed by federal Medicaid funds.
That money, however, represents just a tiny fraction of the total. One estimate, by KFF, puts the sum for noncitizen immigrants at less than 1% of the total between 2017 and 2023. Some years, it has been estimated to be less than half a percentage point.
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