Bush and Obama to divert more public funds for covering uninsured illegal immigrants

Remember that whenever you hear about "the uninsured," it's usually a euphemism for illegal immigrants. The American health care system may not be the best in the first world, but it's hard to be completely without health care -- unless you're here illegally.

So when I read the headline for this NYT article, I immediately suspected to find the usual circumlocutions that tell us a whole shitload of public money is going toward the project of keeping illegals here, rather than give them incentives to go back. Perhaps because they expect most readers to be too distracted by Christmas and New Year's to read the newspaper, they're actually quite frank about who stands to gain the most:

In Nashville, United Neighborhood Health Services, a 32-year-old community health center, has seen its federal financing rise to $4.2 million, from $1.8 million in 2001. That has allowed the organization to add eight clinics to its base of six, and to increase its pool of patients to nearly 25,000 from 10,000.

Still, says Mary Bufwack, the center's chief executive, the clinics satisfy only a third of the demand in Nashville's pockets of urban poverty and immigrant need.

"Immigrant need"? If we don't get to cast votes in Mexican elections, their citizens aren't entitled to our health care programs. If you're soft-hearted, then just send them medical supplies, allow their doctors to be trained here, or pay for them to relocate to a less pathogen-infested part of the world.

Anything but bring them here, which carries the lovely externalities of having their kids join gangs and run amok, paying for bilingual accommodations, and having a larger fraction of our population that isn't smart enough to get through life without continual support from the government. The welfare state should be like a shot of adrenaline pumped into a failing heart, not a steady flow of heroin into the veins of an incurable junkie.

In Mr. Bush's first year in office, he proposed to open or expand 1,200 clinics over five years (mission accomplished) and to double the number of patients served (the increase has ended up closer to 60 percent). With the health centers now serving more than 16 million patients at 7,354 sites, the expansion has been the largest since the program's origins in President Lyndon B. Johnson's war on poverty, federal officials said.

Well with a fine pedigree like that...

"They're an integral part of a health care system because they provide care for the low-income, for the newly arrived, and they take the pressure off of our hospital emergency rooms," Mr. Bush said last year while touring a clinic in Omaha.

With federal encouragement, the centers have made a major push this decade to expand dental and mental health services, open on-site pharmacies, extend hours to nights and weekends and accommodate recent immigrants -- legal and otherwise -- by employing bilingual staff. More than a third of patients are now Hispanic, according to the National Association of Community Health Centers.

In light of all the care they require, Third World immigrants are rather like zoo animals in the minds of the Stuff White People Like crowd. They don't want to actually be around them most of the time, but hope that large sums of public cash will be there to prop up these ghetto zoos. When they get the urge to gawk at the exotic, they can drop by and -- while clamping their noses shut -- sample the Mexicans' culinary sleeper hit, bathtub cheese, their bodies soon feeling all warm and tingly inside as they succumb to tuberculosis.

At $8 billion, the Senate measure may be considered a relative bargain compared with the more than $100 billion needed for Mr. Obama's proposal to subsidize coverage for the uninsured. If his plan runs into fiscal obstacles, a vast expansion of community health centers may again serve as a stopgap while universal coverage waits for flusher times.

I guess that answers Steve Sailer's question about whether or not the benefits of Obama's public works will be restricted to U.S. citizens. But I mean, the fundamentals of our economy are like totally sound -- and so if the government could just get into the kitchen, rearrange some things, we could certainly party with the Mexiraguans. Hell, we've already bailed out enough other morons who made risky business decisions -- why not give everyone a big do-over?