Linking Immigration & Health Care is the solution to BOTH problems

[SoCalDem]

The repubes don't really hate "illegal immigrants". They actually like them ...for gardners, nannies, houeskeepers, home repair, restaurant workers, agricultural workers. The GRIPE they have is that "those people", once here, expect to send their kids to school, and take them to the ER when they are sick. Sometimes they even manage to eke out a little financial aid here and there. Repubes should LOVE them for the fact that lots of immigrants have large families, but when it comes to paying for the ducation and welfare of those kids, well..we all know how they feeal about the cash..

Health care is a huge drain on everyone's pocketbook, starting with employers (the class that repubes 'claim' to belong to) and all the way down to the lowliest of part time workers.

The solution to BOTH problems is a simple national healthcare system (a la Medicare) that EVERY C I T I Z E N of the US is entitled to.

The fly in the ointment here is "proof of citizenship". Because of the phobia of a "national ID card", freeps and even some Dems are throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Ask yourself this..

Would you be willing to pay $100 (guesstimate) for a passport instead of several hundred dollars a month for health insurance?

Would you as an employer, be willing to pay the fees for your employees to GET them each a valid US passport, in lieu of paying the employer share of insurance premiums each pay period..and the mountainous piles of paperwork that go with it?

Would you be willing to show your passport to a medical clinic instead of the health insurance card with virtually the same information, if it meant you paid only a small co-pay?

I can almost promise that if you , as a visitor to Canada or any other country with national healthcare , became ill, you would be treated, but expected to pay for your services. If you were a citizen of the country, you would be able to take advantage of their system.

No doubt, there would also be room for charity hospitals and clinic that exist now, and those would be the ideal candidates for all this "faith-based" organizations we seem to have around.

When it came time to hire someone,the passport number would just be an addition to the hundreds of bits of information that an employer wants from employees.

At election times it would be pretty hard for someone to be denied registration or voting if they had a passport to prove who they are.

It may just be time for America to grow up and quit with the silly games. Anyone who thinks they are even remotely anonymous these days, is fooling themselves.

If you ever attended school, bought anything with a credit card, rented a house/apartment, checked into a hospital, bought insurance.."they" know who you are, and probably know more about you, than YOU do..

The passport would be YOUR passport to the services that you pay for via taxes, and only citizens could easily partake of those services.

There will always be an underground enconomy, and the lack of a passport would not mean that everyone would stop coming here, but it might just slow things down a bit.

[pitohui]

1. passports are routinely stolen

i don't think the two problems are linked

i support universal health care for all usa citizens, however, i don't see why using the passport as proof of identity rather than yr driver's license as is now done w. getting treatment would make any difference

you'd just have more opportunities to be mugged of yr passport, since you would have to carry it everywhere in case of being in an accident