Doctors to Trump: Deporting Illegal Immigrants Would Be Bad for U.S. Health

The American College of Physicians has a message for Donald Trump and any other presidential contender advocating for mass deportation of illegal immigrants: Any plan to kick out those 12 million people from the country could have severe public health consequences.
On Tuesday, the doctors’ group, which represents 143,000 internists, released a statement urging physicians to take a stand against proposals for mass deportation.
Related: Vast Majority of Americans Say Illegal Immigrants Should Stay
“Large-scale deportation of undocumented residents would have severe and unacceptable adverse health consequences for many millions of vulnerable people,” Dr. Wayne J. Riley, the groups’ president, said in a statement. “Numerous studies show that deportation itself, as well as the fear of being deported, causes emotional distress, depression, trauma associated with imposed family separations, and distrust of anyone assumed to be associated with federal, state and local government, including physicians and other health care professionals providing care in publicly-funded hospitals and clinics.”
That distrust, in turn, could result in sick people not getting medical attention, and in cases of patients with infectious diseases, it could even lead to a public health emergency with tremendous costs to the to the overall health care system, the group warned.
On the other hand, having illegal immigrants in the country carries health care costs, too. Medicaid pays around $2 billion a year for emergency treatment for illegal immigrants, Kaiser Health News reported in 2013, adding that the total represents less than 1 percent of total Medicaid costs.
Related: Birthright Citizenship, the New Immigration Scam
Still, the American College of Physicians said doctors have an ethical obligation to advocate for the health interests of all people, without consideration of their residency status.
“Physicians and other health professionals must remind politicians and policymakers that deporting millions of vulnerable people would have adverse health care consequences, not only for the people directly affected and their families, but also for their local communities and for the United States as whole,” Riley said in the statement. “Instead, we need a balanced immigration policy that ensures access to healthcare for all U.S. residents while recognizing that we need appropriate controls over who is admitted.”
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Number of the Day: 51%
More than half of registered voters polled by Morning Consult and Politico said they support work requirements for Medicaid recipients. Thirty-seven percent oppose such eligibility rules.
Martin Feldstein Is Optimistic About Tax Cuts, and Long-Term Deficits
In a new piece published at Project Syndicate, the conservative economist, who led President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1982 to 1984, writes that pro-growth tax individual and corporate reform will get done — and that any resulting spike in the budget deficit will be temporary:
“Although the net tax changes may widen the budget deficit in the short term, the incentive effects of lower tax rates and the increased accumulation of capital will mean faster economic growth and higher real incomes, both of which will cause rising taxable incomes and lower long-term deficits.”
Doing tax reform through reconciliation — allowing it to be passed by a simple majority in the Senate, as long as it doesn’t add to the deficit after 10 years — is another key. “By designing the tax and spending rules accordingly and phasing in future revenue increases, the Republicans can achieve the needed long-term surpluses,” Feldstein argues.
Of course, the big questions remain whether tax and spending changes are really designed as Feldstein describes — and whether “future revenue increases” ever come to fruition. Otherwise, those “long-term surpluses” Feldstein says we need won’t ever materialize.
JP Morgan: Don’t Expect Tax Reform This Year
Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, seems pretty confident that Congress can produce a tax bill in a hurry. He told the Financial Times (paywall) last week that the Ways and Means Committee should be write a bill “in the next three of four weeks.” But most experts doubt that such a complicated undertaking can be accomplished so quickly. In a note to clients this week, J.P. Morgan analysts said they don’t expect to see a tax bill passed until mid-2018, following months of political wrangling:
“There will likely be months of committee hearings, lobbying by affected groups, and behind-the-scenes horse trading before final tax legislation emerges. Our baseline forecast continues to pencil in a modest, temporary, deficit-financed tax cut to be passed in 2Q2018 through the reconciliation process, avoiding the need to attract 60 votes in the Senate.”
Trump Still Has No Tax Reform Plan to Pitch
Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur writes that, even as President Trump prepares to push tax reform thus week, basic questions about the plan have no answers: “Will the changes be permanent or temporary? How will individual tax brackets be set? What rate will corporations and small businesses pay?”
“They’re nowhere. They’re just nowhere,” Henrietta Treyz, a tax analyst with Veda Partners and former Senate tax staffer, tells Kapur. “I see them putting these ideas out as though they’re making progress, but they are the same regurgitated ideas we’ve been talking about for 20 years that have never gotten past the white-paper stage.”
The Fiscal Times Newsletter - August 28, 2017
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