Former President Donald Trump’s bumbling responses on healthcare in his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month earned well-deserved mockery. “Concepts of a plan” to replace the Affordable Care Act has become an instant classic of what not to say on national television. Yet Trump does have a plan to reduce healthcare costs. It’s ugly, won’t really save any money, and is based on a 180-degree reversal of reality, but it’s a plan nonetheless: mass deportation.
Trump and the Republican Party insist that millions of undocumented immigrants “have driven up the cost of … Healthcare for American families.” Trump also says Democrats plan to “add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare” and bankrupt the program that helps elderly and disabled Americans afford medical care. To Donald Trump, healthcare is another reason to round up millions of people and ship them out of the country.
Mr. Trump has it backwards. Outside his cat-eating fantasy world, undocumented immigrants spend large portions of their income subsidizing healthcare for the rest of us, and certainly for elderly and disabled Americans.
