ObamaCare for Illegals

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

ObamaCare for Illegals

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration and a group run by senior Obama White House veterans are encouraging illegal aliens to enroll in Obamacare at Mexico’s consulates across the United States.

Apparently it’s not enough for President Obama to redistribute the wealth of Americans to other Americans. Now he wants to redistribute the wealth of Americans to the Third World.

American taxpayers will undoubtedly foot the bill for these illegal immigrants who enroll in Obamacare.

This enrollment free-for-all appears to be but one prong of President Obama’s program to undermine America’s market-based system of governance by overwhelming it. This subversive approach is called the Cloward-Piven Strategy, named after its creators, Marxist academic-activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven.

Their method for hastening the fall of capitalism called for overloading the government with impossible demands in order to generate social chaos and economic collapse, which would then clear the way for socialist revolution, as I wrote in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. Although the strategy was designed for the so-called welfare rights movement, there is no reason why it can’t be applied to other government endeavors.

Which brings us to a disturbing admission by a community organizer who is pushing illegal immigrants to jump on the Obamacare free-taxpayer-supported-healthcare bandwagon.

“Whether they’re Mexican nationals or whether they’re United States citizens or whether they’re in transition – and if they’re there it is our responsibility within all of America to educate on the Affordable Care Act,” Enroll America field organizer Jose Medrano told Breitbart News.

The Mexican government’s consular office in Brownsville, Texas, hosted an Obamacare enrollment fair last week.

“The Mexican consulate is a very reliable source of information to the Latino community,” Medrano said. “And therefore when they host their events, yesterday being the health fair, there are several hundred people that show up.”

Although illegal aliens aren’t supposed to be getting government healthcare benefits or subsidized coverage under the Affordable Care Act, President Obama seemed to give these individuals the green light to get covered earlier this month. Obama said that the Healthcare.gov website would not be used to ascertain an individual’s immigration status.

“None of the information that is provided in order for you to obtain health insurance is in any way transferred to immigration services,” Obama said reassuringly at the time.

Medrano said 101 families were represented at the Obamacare signup fest in Brownsville, and roughly three fifths of the representatives spoke with a healthcare counselor. The consular office is helpful “as part of the transition” to “mainstream …  America.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been spending a lot of time in Texas recently trying to boost Obamacare enrollment figures. The former Kansas governor has made at least four visits to Texas for Affordable Care Act-related events since Dec. 20, 2013.

“I’m sure [she was aware],” Medrano said when asked if Sebelius knew about the enrollment fair at Mexican consulate in Brownsville. “We put our events in a database that several organizations are connected to at mainly HHS, so they are fully aware of who was here.”

The HHS secretary’s sudden fondness for Texas may have more to do with partisan politics than public health.

It’s no secret that Obama operatives and other Democrats are going all-out to turn the critical Republican-red state of Texas Democrat-blue. Battleground Texas, a well-connected political action committee, was founded by Jeremy Bird, who was national field director for Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign.

Guerrilla videographer James O’Keefe’s group, Project Veritas, paid a visit to Enroll America, which is run by Obama White House alumni. O’Keefe found that Enroll America appeared to be sharing data and working directly with Battleground Texas.

When Brian Pendleton, also of Enroll America, was introduced at a speaking engagement, he called Enroll America “the official group for the DNC [Democratic National Committee].”

And the Obama administration interprets the National Voter Registration Act (a.k.a. the Motor-Voter law) to require that voter registration services be offered when an applicant visits an Obamacare healthcare insurance exchange. Who helped to write the NVRA? Cloward and Piven, of course. President Bill Clinton thanked them by name when they attended the bill signing ceremony in 1993.

In an incredible non-coincidence, a La Mesa, California couple were recently incensed when they received papers to register as Democrats from their health insurance provider Covered California, the state-run agency that implements the Affordable Care Act in the Golden State. They received a letter about voter registration and a registration card already marked with an “x” in the Democratic Party box. The longtime Republicans told local media they were “perplexed as to how the voter registration card pre-marked Democrat ended up in their mailbox.”

Meanwhile, the Mexican consulate in Chicago was the site of an Obamacare enrollment event last month, according to Get Covered Illinois, which is part of Enroll America. The Mexican consulate in Las Vegas has been used for enrollment purposes.

Mexico’s many consular offices in the U.S. have also been used to encourage Mexican nationals in this country to apply for food stamps, as part of a U.S. program that predates the Obama administration.

Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama), said “promoting Obamacare at a Mexican consulate raises three major policy concerns.”

One, the possibility that illegal immigrants could fraudulently access federal subsidies; two, that such promotions provide a financial inducement to unlawfully enter the U.S. (or overstay a visa) by offering households headed by illegal immigrants federal subsidies through their legal relatives or dependents; and three, that these activities widen an existing flaw in our legal admissions process by continuing to subvert the principle that those seeking to lawfully enter the U.S. should be financially self-sufficient.

In 2012, ranking members of the Senate Budget, Finance, Judiciary, and Agriculture committees sent correspondence to then-Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Janet Napolitano and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In the letter they protested the fact that both the Department of State and DHS were encouraging would-be welfare recipients to flock to America by excluding ”reliance on almost all governmental welfare programs when evaluating whether an alien is likely to become a public charge.”

“Under your interpretation,” the senators wrote, ”an able-bodied immigrant of working age could receive the bulk of his or her income in the form of federal welfare and still not be deemed a ‘public charge.’” The Immigration and Nationality Act specifically states, they added, that ”[a]n alien who … is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible” to the United States.

It needs to be pointed out that the outfit Medrano works for, Enroll America, isn’t some rogue operation. It’s a shadowy quasi-official arm of the Obama administration. HHS Secretary Sebelius has engaged in legally questionable efforts to raise money for the group.

Enroll America is a corrupt 501c3 nonprofit that is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, H&R Block, and companies that stand to profit from Obamacare, according to groupsnoop, a research website operated by the National Center for Public Policy Research.

The nonprofit organization was founded in 2011 by Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a far-left group with ties to the labor movement. As of June 2013, Enroll America had refused to disclose how large its no doubt massive budget was.

The group’s leaders are largely Democratic Party operatives and community organizers. Pollack sits on Enroll America’s board. Its president, Anne Filipic, is former deputy director of the Office of Public Engagement for the Obama White House. The group’s managing director, Chris Wyant, was an economics advisor in the Obama White House.

Enroll America’s advisory board is chock full of left-wing pressure groups such as the Texas-based Center for Public Policy Priorities, Community Catalyst, Health Care for America Now, NAACP, National Council of La Raza, National Urban League, Planned Parenthood, Service Employees International Union, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, and Young Invincibles (a project of the ACORN-linked Center for Community Change).

As community organizers continue their frantic efforts to enroll people in Obamacare, the March 31 deadline for enrollment is upon us.

The deadline is make-believe, of course, as Americans learned last week. The Obama administration announced that all consumers who had applied for coverage but failed to complete the process by the end of today will now have until roughly mid-April to follow through.

In congressional testimony barely three weeks ago, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius denied an extension was at hand. On March 12 when Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas) asked, “Are you going to delay the open enrollment beyond March 31st?” Sebelius answered, “No, sir.”

But that was then. HHS claims there has been a sudden jump in enrollments.

“We are experiencing a surge in demand and are making sure that we will be ready to help consumers who may be in line by the deadline to complete enrollment — either online or over the phone,” HHS spokeswoman Joanne Peters said last week.

In what is likely a lie or at best a half-truth, the Obama administration said last week that “more than 6 million Americans have signed up for coverage through the Health Insurance Marketplaces since October 1, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.” As previous media exposes have shown, the administration has a habit of counting people who open accounts at Healthcare.gov or who select a plan but don’t actually pay for it as Obamacare enrollees.

Sebelius rationalized away the deadline extension, which is yet another lawless presidential modification of Obamacare. She likened the in-limbo status of healthcare applications to citizens standing in line when the polls close. Those individuals are still allowed to vote even though the official deadline has passed, she said, so it’s only fair that applicants part way through the process be accommodated.

Applicants will reportedly be given an opportunity to indicate they tried to enroll before the March 31 deadline by checking a box on the website, but HHS will make no effort to verify whether previous signups were attempted.

Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) said the move rendered the Obamacare deadline “meaningless.”

“The administration is now resorting to an honor system to enforce it. What the hell is this, a joke?” Boehner said last week.

Avik Roy of Forbes says this latest moving of the goalposts is obviously politically motivated. The extension is “designed to get as many people under the Obamacare tent as possible, to ensure that the law is impervious to repeal.”

All of this is another reminder that the government takeover of healthcare has never been about healthcare.

President Obama’s increasingly unpopular Affordable Care Act is about radically transforming America by extending government control over all aspects of life, redistributing wealth, encouraging dependency, and building the Democratic Party base among voters, whether citizens or not.

Obama and his radical brethren want to reconstruct America so that the collective trumps the individual, and the rest of the world trumps America.

Last year the president said that Obamacare was about securing civil rights. He expounded the ugly, neo-Marxist view that every American has the right to extract free medical care from taxpayers and unwilling providers.

“In the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one should go broke just because they get sick,” he said. “In the United States, health care is not a privilege for the fortunate few, it is a right.”

In Obama’s estimation this so-called right to health care supersedes all other rights.

Obamacare is a means to an end and if community organizers have to troll Mexican consular offices in order to rope in enrollees, President Obama is fine with that.