Politico is reporting that Joe Biden’s nominee for head of the Department of Health and Human Services, second-generation Mexican-American Xavier Becerra, is a long-time supporter of healthcare for illegal aliens. His “exceedingly deep convictions” on the matter even led to clashes with then-President Barack Obama in 2009 when Becerra was serving as a Democrat Representative from California.
Obama, caught up in his Obamacare quest, said at the time:
There are also those who claim that our reform effort will insure illegal immigrants. This, too, is false — the reforms I’m proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally. [Emphasis added.]
Becerra was rankled by what he saw as a capitulation on Obama’s part to Republican demands, and called it “more than disturbing.”
That was then, and this is now. Obama’s second-in-command Biden has shuffled his way into the White House and nominated the former Congressman to head a cabinet-level department. From that vantage and with the backing of the Democrat establishment, Becerra would have the power to do what neither he nor Obama could do in 2009: provide government-funded health insurance to persons residing illegally in this country.
During last year’s campaign, along with all of his rivals, candidate Biden signaled his support. In an interview with Telemundo, he first asserted his belief that aliens were already eligible for Obamacare. Told this was not true, he insisted that in his administration, they would be.
Enter former Obama detractor Becerra, part of the newly ascendant far-left Democrat vanguard, who once told California Healthline, “For me, health care is a right. I’ve been a single-payer advocate all my life.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that currently 30 million people living in America lack health insurance. The U.S. taxpayer already pays an estimated $18.5 billion toward the medical costs of illegal aliens living here. Providing taxpayer-funded health insurance to all illegals could cost upwards of $66 billion every year. In addition, it would be yet another enticement to would-be Americans the world over to cross our Biden-porous southern border, making the matter even worse.
For more, see Politico and Breitbart News.