Jeb Bush: I am really upset because Obama has not made some Americans into second-class citizens!
Benjy Sarlin on Jeb Bush (and Clinton Bolick):
Obamacare Is Bad Because Citizens Whose Parents Are Illegal Get Benefits: Here’s a surprise. Seemingly out of nowhere, Bush condemns the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, recently accepted by Gov. Rick Scott (R-FL), for doling out “welfare” to the children of illegal immigrants.
This is why the Obama administration’s attempt to coerce states to adopt a major Medicaid expansion as part of its national health-care program had the effect of inflaming anti-immigration sentiment. Although the administration assured the states that illegal immigrants would not be eligible for Medicaid benefits, their children who are born in the United States are eligible because they are citizens…. Fortunately the US Supreme Court struck down the Medicaid expansion by a 7-2 vote as unduly coercive and therefore contrary to constitutional principles of federalism. The proposal should not be resurrected….
Bush isn’t even complaining about illegal immigrants getting Medicaid benefits, he’s complaining about American citizens who were born in the country…. [It] has nothing to do with Obamacare: the president didn’t invent Medicaid, and those kids were already free to apply, just as their citizenship lets them apply to myriad social programs.
It is true, as Bush notes, that more of these children will be eligible for Medicaid benefits in states like Florida now. That’s because more Floridians in general will be eligible for Medicaid under the Obamacare expansion….
The whole thing sounds an awful lot like something a Republican candidate for president might say in a primary debate.
