Obamacare For Illegal Aliens Could Cost Taxpayers $23 Billion A Year, Study Shows

The federal government is running a nearly trillion-dollar deficit this fiscal year. The reason (and this isn’t complex): It spends more than it brings in.  When households go into the red, couples usually take a simple step — stop spending so much.

But not our government.

Case in point: A new study shows that taxpayers could have to pay out as much as $23 billion a year to give “Obamacare” health coverage to illegal aliens.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) calculates that there are nearly 5 million illegals who would qualify for subsidies through the health care system created under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) by former president Barack Obama. The average cost would be about $4,500, so if all of them took the subsidies, it’d cost $22.5 billion.

Even if less than half enroll, it would still cost $10 billion.

“Many of the Democratic candidates for president have endorsed providing health insurance to illegal immigrants. This analysis estimates the cost of providing illegal immigrants access to the existing system of government health benefits for low-income people,” CIS writes.

“?We estimate that there are 4.9 million uninsured illegal immigrants with incomes low enough to qualify for Medicaid or Advanced Premium Tax Credits (APTC), which are the subsidies provided by the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Assuming a realistic enrollment rate, the cost of providing ACA subsidies to illegal immigrants would be about $10 billion per year, with costs rising to as much as $23 billion per year if all eligible illegal immigrants enrolled. Costs would be similar under a hybrid approach that provides Medicaid for the lowest-income illegal immigrants and ACA subsidies for those with higher incomes.”

CIS said continuing to allow foreigners to flow in illegally will create “a significant burden for taxpayers.”

“Numbers aside, the fact that presidential candidates are advocating spending billions of dollars on people who are in the country illegally is significant in its own right. It suggests that allowing in large numbers of less-educated workers will inevitably generate significant political pressure to provide them access to social programs. If there is significant political pressure to provide coverage to people in the country illegally, it seems almost certain that over time pressure will grow to provide healthcare to low-wage guestworkers and other ‘temporary’ immigrants as well.