After all the hooplah with this year’s hot immigration reform debate, complete with Republican Teabaggers howling about immigrants supposedly overtaxing our healthcare system, you’d think that immigrants come to the United States of America for the sole purpose of parasitizing off of an inferior healthcare system that is the laughing stock of the developed world.
Sure that sounds crazy, but we’ve always known the GOP’s off its rocker. Fortunately, that “old wive’s tale” is not even close to the real story. It turns out that we owe our immigrants a serious debt of gratitude for keeping our Medicare system solvent, despite our aging population. Because — believe it or not — our immigrants pay a lot more into the system than they take back.
Sabrina Tavernise from The New York Times reports that a recent study from Harvard Medical School reveals that:
Immigrants have contributed billions of dollars more to Medicare in recent years than the program has paid out on their behalf, according to a new study, a pattern that goes against the notion that immigrants are a drain on federal health care spending.
That’s right. The supposed “moochers” that the GOP wants to keep out — or deprive of citizenship once they get here — have contributed WAY more than they’ve consumed. This at least holds true for Medicare..
According to Tavernise, our immigrants have done extremely well for us, as well as themselves, and have:
Generated surpluses totaling $115 billion from 2002 to 2009. In comparison, the American-born population incurred a deficit of $28 billion over the same period.
Yep, our American-born population consumes $28 billion more in Medicare benefits than we’re able to pay for right now. It’s a danged good thing we’ve got these immigrant populations pumping in $115 billion.
another right wing myth flushed it's only bigotry that is the only reason coupled with racism that fuels the right wiong lie machine, this day and age you would think they would use computers to verify the lie before they put it out there in their name, or is it they think they know their base still hasn't reciovered from their "i believe" deficiency and since they are the targeyt and they get the message from FOX et al then mission accomplished, except since Bush said it it still represents the same thing in the republican party, big fat lie.
