When Republicans thought about how they could rein in federal spending, one idea was to curb how much federal largesse gets handed out to illegal aliens through fraudulent means. If you are appalled at the thought of denying government money to illegal aliens, money from hard-working taxpayers who play by the rules, then you might fit inside the newsroom at The Washington Post. Their front-page headline today: "Medicaid Rule Called A Threat To Millions."
Reporters Susan Levine and Mary Otto explained that a Medicaid rule takes effect Saturday that requires proof of citizenship before Medicaid recipients collect benefits, even if they have long benefited from Medicaid. The liberal sermonizing started in paragraph three, although there was not a single liberal label for any "advocate for the poor" anywhere in the piece. They're just "critics," not partisans or lobbyists:
"Critics fear that the provision will have the unintended consequence of harming several million U.S. citizens who, for a variety of reasons, will not be able to produce the necessary paperwork. They include mentally ill, mentally retarded and homeless people, as well as elderly men and women, especially African Americans born in an era when hospitals in the rural South barred black women from their maternity wards."
Levine and Otto went first to "critic" Andrea Sloan, a court-appointed guardian for some 40 D.C. residents. The conservative opinion in the piece gets this brief mention:
Rep. Charles Whitlow Norwood Jr. (R-Ga.), one of the prime sponsors, decried "the outright theft of Medicaid benefits by illegal aliens."
Levine and Otto do absolutely nothing to gauge the size or impact of illegal aliens adding to the deficit by fraudulently obtaining government benefits. The rest of the article reads like an impassioned editorial, providing only the views of people opposed to the new rule and decrying all the hardships it will cause. They can't even provide a liberal label for that Hillarycare-promoting socialist, Ron Pollack of Families USA:
"In the process of pandering on the illegal immigrant issue, members of Congress will do enormous harm to the American citizens who need help the most," Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, said during a teleconference.
