At long last, President Joe Biden is moving to make DACA recipients eligible for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act insurance marketplaces — programs they pay for, and have long desperately needed, but been shut out of for reasons that are purely political in nature.
There is zero public health rationale for excluding undocumented immigrants from government-funded health insurance programs, and all other rationalizations quickly twist themselves into pretzels. Ultimately, as the COVID pandemic made abundantly clear, the health of one person is not the issue of only that one person.
Even setting aside basic human decency, it’s a poor investment to shut certain people out of access to health care. That goes for more than just contagious diseases; as has been established again and again, preventive care is not only better for people’s health but much cheaper in the long run than dealing with what could have routine, simple matters in the pricey emergency room.
