Nativists Attack 0

If I weren’t old, I wouldn’t have seen this article:

Bernice Todd’s Choctaw family roots are sunk deep in the soil of Oklahoma, a state whose very name is Choctaw for “red people.” But in the middle of a debilitating battle with cancer, Todd, a 39-year-old who cleans homes at a trailer park and baby-sits for a living, lost her state Medicaid health care coverage because, although she’s a Native American, she could not prove she is a U.S. citizen.

While Todd’s case is rich in irony, she is one of tens of thousands of Americans who are falling victim to a new federal rule—aimed at keeping illegal immigrants off the Medicaid rolls—requiring that recipients prove their citizenship and identity with documents many don’t have.

(snip)

“This rule was the answer to a problem that really doesn’t exist,” says Donna Cohen Ross, an analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in Washington, a nonpartisan research organization.

In fact, the year the rule was passed, Mark McClellan, then the administrator for CMS, said that a report by the CMS inspector general did “not find particular problems regarding false allegations of citizenship, nor are we aware of any.” Most states agreed with that assessment.

This would seem pretty typical of the Republic Party. Claiming that it is protecting American citizens, it solves a problem that doesn’t exist, thereby damaging American citizens. It also is able to throw a bone to those amongst its constituency who don’t like brown people by raising, then tilting at the windmill of fraudulent Medicaid enrollments.

(Haven’t they figured out that the last thing a sane illegal immigrant is likely to do is to join a government program, for heaven’s sake?)

It’s sort of like their phony voter fraud campaign. (Election fraud historically has not occurred at the polling place; it’s occurred at the counting place).

Hell, what about the War in Iraq–claiming to protect Americans, the Republic Party has (failed to) solve a problem that didn’t exist, created a whole slew, maybe two or three slews, of problems that didn’t exist before, all the while causing the death, injury, and displacement of hundreds of thousands of persons.

The Republic Party is clearly not fit to govern.