Wait a Second. Why Shouldn’t We Insure Illegals?

Call it the shout heard round the world. Since last Wednesday, when Rep. Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, interrupted Barack Obama's big speech on health-care reform to shout "You lie!," Beltway bloviators have bloviated about little else. Wilson's vulgarity. Wilson’s apology. Wilson's "dirty health-care secret". Wilson's charming effort to make American politics more British.

And that's just at NEWSWEEK.

Few of us, however, have actually bothered to address the issue that provoked Wilson's outburst: health insurance for illegal immigrants. The line he objected to—"The reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally"—is, in fact, not a "lie." The current House bill makes it very clear that "individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States" will not be allowed to receive subsidies. To wrangle assistance, illegal aliens would have to commit identity fraud, something that rarely happens in our current public-health-care system (a.k.a. Medicare). And Democratic senators have just announced that they'll require those who participate to show proof of citizenship. So it's a nonissue.

But let's just assume, for argument's sake, that we all live in Wilsonville, where Obama is the lying liar his critics allege him to be—the sort of psycho who has chosen to sacrifice his political future on the flaming pyre of anti-immigrant sentiment by concocting a secret scheme to cover the nation's estimated 11.9 million illegals. Would that really be so bad?

Of course, insuring undocumented workers is ethically murky and politically impossible. Some people argue that if we're hiring illegals to, say, shingle our roofs, we have a moral obligation to care for them if they fall off. But more people, it seems, simply want them out of the country. Given that illegal immigrants have, by definition, broken our laws, it makes sense that large numbers of upstanding citizens oppose any measure that would encourage more foreigners to sneak into America or make their lives easier once they're here.