4 ms·
Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
by aliston 8y ago
Why should California tax payers provide health insurance to illegal immigrants?
- sabujp 8y agobecause they provide services that you rely on and do jobs that legal migrants and citizens aren't going to do
- danablast 8y agoMaybe if we could pay citizens fair market price for their labor we wouldn't have to rely on illegal immigrants.
- sabujp 8y agohow many citizens and legal migrants do you know are going to work in backbreaking conditions picking the food you eat for minimum wage? Cheap robots haven't caught up yet to pick and grow everything we need. Also note that not everyone can pay whole food prices
- mdorazio 8y agoIf they got paid a living wage to do it with reasonable hours? A huge number. Would that mean food would get more expensive? Yes. Is that a bad thing? No.
- oh_sigh 8y agoOP said "market price for their labor", not minimum wage. If there is no one willing to do the labor for minimum wage, then minimum wage is not the market price for that labor. When you can't afford to pay necessary labor costs for a product, the answer isn't to go to the black market.
- danablast 8y agoThank God for those illegal immigrants. Without them we would all have starved I guess.
- koolba 8y agoI’ve thought about this quite a bit. California min wage is $11/hour. Let’s say that the market rate for legal worker labor that’s going to work the fields is double that, that still seems like it’d be affordable. It’s not like labor is 100% of the cost of produce. There’s seed, fertilizer, packaging, transport. I’d be surprised if labor was even 25% of the wholesale cost. Yes it’d be more expensive but I don’t think it’d be prohibitively so.
- taobility 8y agoPlease get out of California, especially SV, and go to mid-US, there are so many US citizens can't afford daily food.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- hindsightbias 8y agoSomeone should forward this to the current Ag Secretary: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/when-the-u-s-government-tried-to-replace-migrant-farmworkers-with-high-schoolers https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/07/31/634442195/wh...
- imperialyuma 8y agoThrowaway because I don’t want this associated with me publically. I grew up in the Imperial Valley, California and graduated from CUHS the year after the recession hit. At the time I had no prospects, I wasn’t a software developer, I didn’t have the grades or money for college outside IVC and neither did many of my classmates. No fewer than 7-10 people my age, my class, were working the fields nearby the winter after graduation, all US citizens most at least 2nd generation, 2-3 pochos that couldn’t even speak Spanish. It wasn’t good money, but it was money that was available without having leave/stop helping your family and move to San Diego and pay San Diego rent, food, transport, and moving prices for some shitty job at a Cici’s Pizza while living in a 2 bed/1 bathroom apartment with 4 other people and trying to catch classes at grossmont, city, Mesa etc simultaneously. Many people would take that opportunity, you just don’t know any of us.
- atomi 8y agoYeah I bet, just not enough to meet the demand.
- oh_sigh 8y agoSo, the fact that these people live in the underworld and generally get mistreated by their employers and paid illegally low wages is a feature to you? Interesting.
- sabujp 8y agoit's not a feature, it's the current state, as someone above mentioned the market isn't paying minimum wage and has to rely on lots of migrant laborers to pick the food. Yes we can do better. One incremental step is to give them free or affordable healthcare
- throwawayunodos 8y agoHow do you know? Perhaps if there were no illegal aliens the market would have set a different floor on the salary.
- diafygi 8y agoBecause it's the compassionate thing to do? Also because it's much cheaper.
- trentnix 8y agoUnless it incentivizes more illegal immigration.
- ddoolin 8y agoThat may say more about a place's immigration policies rather than their healthcare policies.
- isoskeles 8y agoIt would be compassionate of these illegal immigrants to improve their own countries instead of using resources in the next country. Another way to resolve the cost might be to fine companies that hire illegal immigrants or to send bills / decrease funding (although I don't think CA sends any funding overseas) to countries that have illegal immigrants here.
- nikdaheratik 8y agoYes, lets fault the shoeless refugees with kids for not single-handedly fixing the complex problems in their countries, some of which are caused by US Government actions going back over 40 years. That sounds like a winning solution. Or maybe California is dealing with their domestic problems as best they can, and the Federal government should start helping Central America rather than starting pointless trade wars.
- isoskeles 8y agoI'm pleased to inform you that many "refugees" have shoes and aren't caricatures of animals.
- imtringued 8y agoWhen you think about it the best way for immigrants to improve their own countries is to move to the US or any other right country, earn a lot of USD/etc there and then move back to their home country. Every dollar they earn and spend in their homecountry will eventually return to the US because they can't do anything with dollars in the homecountry except exchange it with someone who will buy american products.
- baddox 8y agoDoes helping individuals with their healthcare improve society? Presumably any advocate of government healthcare programs would say that it does. If it does, then why would the legal status of each individual affect the societal improvement?
- grecy 8y agoYou can look at developed countries that do provide healthcare to individuals, who across the board have lower murder rates and violent crime than the US. It's easy to answer your question, just look outside your own borders.
- dnhz 8y agoI believe the grandparent asked those questions rhetorically.
- Reedx 8y agoHow do you know that's causal or even correlated in a meaningful way? As it happens, pool drownings correlate with Nic Cage film releases - https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1082063513961533440 https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1082063513961533440
- cronix 8y agoThat's an observation one could make by strictly looking at numbers, but it is not cause and effect.
- p1necone 8y agoBecause the alternative is hospitals treating them anyway and sending out bills that will never get paid - ultimately costing society even more. Unless you actually think illegal immigrants should just be left to die when they have medical issues? I sure hope not.
- taobility 8y agoif so, why should any patient pay the bill to the hospital?
- techslave 8y ago"never get paid" means: by the care recipient. obviously someone pays ... it's spread across all who do pay their bills. and you should pay your bill because the hospital will sue you for it. it's only when the debt is finally uncollectible that it gets absorbed.
- amerine 8y agoBecause as a society we know it’s cheaper to treat early and often rather than deal with emergencies 80% of the time. Also, I agree with you, but likely from a different place. No individual should be paying a hospital bill, it should be included in a tax on my income. If I have lots of income I pay for lots of people, maybe an astounding amount, if I have little to no income I depend on my wealthy neighbors to cover me. Seems to me like the only way to go, that or I guess the rich get eaten.
- taobility 8y agofollowing this logic, we shouldn't get salary from our daily work. Everyone is working for the country, and the country would take care you everything, education, healthcare, housing etc. Yes, this is called communism. And China has tried that in 1950s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward), which is even better, that you don't even need to cook for yourself, as the community would provide a public cafe for free. But it proved that's not working.
- zzzeek 8y agobecause health care is a human right.
- taobility 8y agowho said that? If so, should Medi-Cal also cover the medial expense of Africa? There are more people in terrible condition than these illegal ones.
- zzzeek 8y ago> who said that? the World Health Organization in their constitution established in 1946: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/human-rights-and-health https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/human-right... crazy radical stuff huh?
- taobility 8y agoyeah, it's much crazy radical like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18850770 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18850770 So basically the hospital charge extra money for those legal residency's human right to support those illegal ones' human right. That's great!
- danablast 8y agonot on my credit it's not.
- techslave 8y agoi probably don't agree with GP, but the credit you have is in no small part due to the cheap cost of food and services that illegal immigrants provide. if you had to pay the full cost of legal labor for those products and services, you'd have much less "credit" to show for it. you may even say you would rather have it that way. but that's not the world we live in.
- techslave 8y agocareful. so are you saying that a $5MM procedure to save a lazy ne'er do well homeless person from some exotic condition, whereupon their release from the hospital will go back to being homeless and is likely to die of some "ordinary" disease, is a basic human right? where is the line between what level of health care is a right and what level is not? i'll note there is no such thing as a life-saving procedure. even trauma interventions are just deferral of death. don't get me wrong, i don't have an answer myself. i'm just trying to understand your position in better detail. we are all here due to the compassion of many, many others, most of which are unrecognized. but a right? how can it be a right when health care as we know it today didn't even exist 100 years ago? and healthcare isn't free. someone pays for it, and as we are divided into nations, it's the citizens of a given nation that have done the paying. i do believe illegal immigrants should get better treatment, possibly including healthcare. After all, they are (contrary to those who need someone to blame for their woes) doing us a desired service. so yeah, there's a grey area on healthcare. but, a right?
- inscionent 8y agoBecause these people are a part of California society. Because California businesses are taking advantage of these people for cheap labor. If California tax payers have an issue with this they should take it up with the businesses who aren't pulling their weight.
- colmmacc 8y agoQuite a lot of the undocumented immigrants in California are themselves California tax payers.
- throwawayunodos 8y agoHow? Sure, they pay sales tax, but they definitely do NOT pay income tax since for that you need an SSN or a tax-id which illegal aliens do not have. Downvoters: please explain if I was factually wrong, or did you just not like what I said.
- taobility 8y agowhat's your point for this? If someone bought any Apple products, they also pay tax to California, should they also get free healthcare at California?
- rhegart 8y ago100% agreed. By far the stupidest platform of the left. If illegals hear this, then more and more of them will come to California from other countries and especially other states. We pay $10k a year per illegal kid already which has deeply burdened our schools. We currently already pay for illegal kids healthcare completely because they are covered under medi-cal and we have emergency health care for those who urgently need it covered. We also fund clinics for illegals. I think that is more than fair and I do agree with this, but the new proposals go way too far. That money could be spent on infrastructure, climate change, less of a tax burden, elimination of regressive taxes, more subsidized housing etc. The most disgusting thing about this is my cousin is disabled and I went with his family to an informational hearing and almost every disabled person there was borderline homeless. Living in their cars, sharing 1 room with 3 people etc. because the state only gives $700 a month if you were born disabled. All the low income houses are taken, so it’s make it on your own. I did more digging and found organizations in SF that help illegals get free housing and they do this if their kids are citizens. Since citizen kids are a priority, organizations help their families get a house and they stay there for 18 years. My disabled cousin whose parents have likely paid over a million in taxes gets left out in the cold while these people get this. He at least has family support, what about all the disabled and poor seniors who have no voice, no platform, no ability to fight for themselves. This is the one topic where I lose nuance and my blood boils. I greatly disagree with illegal immigration and especially providing benefits over the current medical for emergencies and for kids under 18.
- nikdaheratik 8y agoThere's an awful lot of anec-data and not much actual fact here. The people who deal with the problems mostly think this plan is a good idea. Perhaps you should think about why that is rather than bringing your own personal issues and biases into this discussion.
- rhegart 8y agoWhich part is not a fact? That it costs $10k per illegal kid in California schools which are ranked 49th in the country? Down from near the top 20 years ago? That our schools are overflowing and getting worse in Los Angeles County, the epicenter of the problems, the schools are so bad that everyone is moving to charters. That illegal kids are covered by medi-cal until they come of age? That we fund health clinics? That if you have a citizen baby, organizations aid you to get low income housing which then you use for the entire family? Please tell me a non fact into any of this. Please learn to read and critically think. Anecdotes in conjunction with facts help make compelling arguments. You have brought neither. “The people who deal with the problems think this plan is a good idea”. This statement is downright moronic. Obviously the leftists who created this policy think it’s a good idea...those who disagree and create other policies such as harsher border security also think their plan is a good idea. Does that mean you will concede your critical thinking to those you disagree with?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]