Grassfire Backgrounder:
State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) Reauthorization Gives Illegals Access To Benefits

Bill Status
Name: HR 976
The Senate passed the bill 8/2/07. House passed the Senate bill, resolving differences, 9/26/07. Summary info here.

Overview
Ten Years after it’s inception, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) is up for congressional reauthorization. Reauthorization provides Congress with an opportunity to review and assess the program’s goals and objectives.

SCHIP was enacted to address coverage needs of low-income uninsured children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid but not enough to purchase private coverage on their own. Over time states have deviated from the original intent of SCHIP and have used the SCHIP budget to provide healthcare for not only children, but parents, pregnant women, and childless adults. This reauthorization bill also opens the door for another group of recipients—illegal immigrants.

Illegals Get Access
How can illegal immigrants get into this program? A simple provision allows potential enrollers to show only a social security card—not documents proving citizenship—when they apply at the state level to get into the state programs. Although an admirable program to help children receive necessary medical care, the reauthorization bill, in its current state, flagrantly encourages illegal aliens to break our immigration laws and fraudulently enroll in taxpayer-funded public assistance programs.

Grassfire Analysis
This bill does contain dangerous loopholes. The adoption of the Senate’s language for SSI verification for citizenship status does not fix the illegal immigration issues found in the House-passed SCHIP bill.

The Senate backed bill does not provide for the necessary checks and balances upon legal or illegal immigrants. According to the Senate backed bill, an immigrant must only show their Social Security (SS) Card. Just showing the card should does not provide enough evidence of their legal eligibility for the programs. For example, there are 4 main classes of individuals that can receive Social Security numbers/cards.
1) All U.S. citizens
2) Non-citizens who are authorized to work in the U.S. (a.k.a immigrants)
3) Non-citizens who are temporarily permitted to work (denoted on S.S. card as VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTORIZATION)
4) Non-citizens not authorized to work (denoted on S.S. card as VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION)

Notably, the SSN issued does not change if the non-citizen adjusts status (i.e. marriage to citizen, naturalization, etc) or breaches the terms of their immigration visa. The SSN card does not identify the immigrant’s citizenship, immigration status or that the person is really who the SSN says he is. There exists a huge loophole in these provisions to allow for identity fraud, breach of immigration terms, etc. At the end of the day, the bill's requirement of a SSN card is an open door for non-citizens and illegal aliens to get access to taxpayer-funded benefits.

This is similar to what happened before 9/11. A number of the terrorists overstayed their visas and did not notify the immigration officials of the necessary immigration information. Many of the terrorists were found with at a minimum of 10 SSNs and fake identities.

The cost? Rep. Nathan Deal has referenced a CBO report that estimates illegal aliens would receive $6.5 billion in taxpayer benefits.

In addition to social security cards, all potential enrollers should be forced to produce state certified photo identification cards, such as a driver’s license, student identification cards, proof of residency and if necessary immigration papers . This Senate-approved bill does not provide the necessary checks and balances to properly identify the immigrants.

President Bush has threatened veto.

More Grassfire Immigration Backgrounders here