WASHINGTON– President Joe Biden is set to announce that his administration is expanding eligibility for Medicaid and Affordable Care Act health insurance exchanges to hundreds of thousands of immigrants brought illegally to the United States as they were children, according to two U.S. officials briefed on the matter.
The action will allow participants of the Deferred Action for Obama-era Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to access government-funded health insurance programs. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter ahead of Thursday’s official announcement.
The 2012 DACA initiative aimed to protect immigrants brought to the United States illegally by their parents as young children from deportation and to allow them to work legally in the country. However, immigrants were still not eligible for government-subsidized health insurance programs because they did not meet the definition of “legal presence” in the United States. That’s what Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services will aim to change by the end of the month.
The White House action comes as the DACA program is in legal jeopardy and the number of people eligible for the program is dwindling.
An estimated 580,000 people were still registered with DACA at the end of last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services. This number is down from previous years. Court orders currently prevent the US Department of Homeland Security from processing new requests. The DACA program has been mired in legal challenges for years, while Congress has been unable to reach consensus on broader immigration reforms.
DACA recipients can work legally and pay taxes, but they have no legal status and are denied many benefits available to US citizens and aliens living in the United States.
In recent years, millions of people in the United States have enrolled in Medicaid, the program that provides health care coverage to the poorest Americans, during the COVID-19 pandemic. The government has increased federal subsidies to bring down the cost of plans in the Affordable Care Act market. Last year, only 8% of Americans lacked health insurance, according to HHS.
But DACA recipients, as well as those in the undocumented country, are not allowed to join these federally funded programs. About half of the roughly 20 million immigrants who live in the United States without papers are uninsured, according to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.
Although there is bipartisan support for putting in place some sort of protection for immigrants, negotiations have often broken down due to debates over border security and whether expanding protections might spur others people trying to enter the United States without permission. Biden, a Democrat, has repeatedly called on Congress to provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children.
Other categories of immigrants – including asylum seekers and people with temporary protected status – are already eligible to purchase insurance through the ACA markets, the Health Care Act of 2010 of former President Barack Obama, often referred to as “Obamacare”.