We’ve noted that CNSNews.com has latched onto a conspiracy theory tying together the issues of health care reform. As CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey has summed up: “Illegal immigrants won’t get federal health insurance benefits under Obama’s plan because they won’t be illegal immigrants anymore, they will be legal immigrants.” CNS has pushed that conspiracy over the past week.
A Sept. 16 article by Matt Cover gave away the whole thing in its overly long headline: “[Steny] Hoyer Won’t Answer Directly Whether Immigration Reform Would Make Current Illegal Aliens Eligible for Federally Subsidized Health Insurance Under Obamacare.” Cover followed up the next day in the same vein, asking other senators “whether people who are currently illegal aliens in the United States would become eligible for health insurance subsidies under the proposed health-care reform plan if they were made into legal residents and put on a pathway to citizenship by an immigration reform bill.”
CNS then latched onto what it seems to consider its smoking gun on the non-issue: a statement at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute that, as summarized in a Sept. 18 article by Nicholas Ballasy, “llegal immigrants would not get government funded health insurance under his health care reform, but said the debate over that plan underscores the need to legalize illegal immigrants so they can get that coverage.”
Of course, all of this is nothing more than an attempt by CNS and its fellow conservatives to attack health care reform by hitching it to another issue conservatives despise, comprehensive immigration reform. As we’ve noted, CNS has repeatedly and baselessly attacked comprehensive immigration reform as “amnesty.”