December 03, 2003
Immigrants To The (Medicare) Rescue—In WSJ Wonderland.
In ancient Greek plays it’s called
a
“deus ex machina.” A God suddenly appears and resolves
a seemingly hopeless situation. In today’s public
policy debates, immigration is the new deus.
A prime example of the mindset is
seen in
Wall Street Journal Edit
Pager’s Holman W. Jenkins Jr.’s recent
(and otherwise quite
sensible) ruminations on the
vast increase in future government spending that is
the Bush Administration’s Medicare drug benefit:
“A
nation held hostage to the elderly in this way could
easily end up like
Japan, except for one safety valve: immigration.
Maybe it’s time for Washington to pass a new version of
the Gramm-Rudman budget law in the ‘80s, this one
requiring every entitlement for retirees to come with an
explicit increase in working-age immigrants to help pay
for it.” [Wall Street Journal, November 26,
2003, p.A17—not online
(cheapskates!)]
(Apparently, Jenkins
[email
him] didn’t realize that the Medicare bill
also contains a major
subsidy to immigration—reimbursement of border
hospitals’ costs from their federally-mandated treatment
of illegals. But hey, who can read all these things?)
Nevertheless, this vision of
immigrants paying Medicare taxes and then magically
vanishing before claiming Medicare benefits—available
only to age 65-plus seniors—just doesn’t comport with
reality. Immigrant use of Medicare is already surprisingly
heavy (11.3 percent vs. 13.7 percent of native-born
Americans). And it will most likely increase as
immigrants age.
Anyway, many of Jenkins’
“working-age immigrants” are either
unemployed or have
incomes low enough to qualify for the quite separate
health programs for the
indigent. Among the latter: 3.5 million immigrants
who currently receive Medicaid, the federal program for
poor families with children.
Meanwhile, older immigrants are
anything but reticent when it comes to Medicare:
Medicare recipiency among
naturalized citizens deserves particular scrutiny. Since
the mid-1990s, making citizenship a condition for
welfare eligibility has been fashionable as a
politically cheap way of reducing welfare costs.
Result: immigrant groups with the
heaviest welfare use rates—for example,
Dominicans—have seen the largest
increases in
naturalization.
And naturalized citizens are now
nearly twice as likely to receive Medicare than
native-born Americans: 20.7% versus 13.7%.
[Number fans
click here for
underlying tables.]
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email
him) is President of
ESR Research
Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.
