RFK Jr. Hearings Spotlight How the Border Crisis Under the Biden Administration is Impacting Our Healthcare System

During Bobby Kennedy Jr.’s heated Senate confirmation hearing as the nominee for HHS secretary, he disclosed that Medicaid expenditures surged by an astonishing 60% throughout Joe Biden’s term.

“Our ship is sinking. The 60% rise in Medicaid over the last four years has become our largest budget item, and it’s expanding at a faster rate than any other,” he stated.

Biden’s border crisis is the underlying factor in what transpired over the past four years.

It follows logically that bringing in an additional 10 to 20 million low-income potential patients, none of whom have contributed in net taxes, would lead to a major escalation in Medicaid and Medicare expenses.

This is the inconvenient truth that the Biden administration and their allies in the “fact-checking” sphere have been eager to suppress.

However, discussions with doctors who have worked near the border reveal that illegal immigrants receive unlimited taxpayer-funded healthcare, often facing severe health challenges.

“Ask me how many of my pregnant patients who are undocumented have Medicaid?” questioned a doctor I know, who spent two years at hospitals in Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas, and prefers to remain anonymous.

“100%,” he replied.

Bonus for disability

According to him, many of these patients are also enrolled in some form of disability benefits, such as Supplemental Security Income, aimed at low-income aged, blind, or disabled American citizens.

Common reasons for seeking additional benefits include obesity, hypertension, and adjustment disorders, although one young woman he treated claimed disability due to a car accident in Texas while crossing the border.

“They often don’t speak English, making my consultations extend by an average of 15 extra minutes per patient as we communicate through a translator. Guess who covers those translation costs?” the doctor pointed out.

Of course, it’s the taxpayer who ends up footing the bill.

“Every illegal migrant crossing the border in Arizona and New Mexico received an envelope containing documents for healthcare, food stamps, and $2,200 in cash, all part of their transit papers. Their first stop after receiving this envelope was usually either Walmart or the emergency room,” he explains.

He mentioned that Customs and Border Protection provided them with “vouchers from the federal government on an individual basis for healthcare… They were assigned a group number and policy number intended for federal employees’ health insurance… which would revert back to Medicare if necessary.”

Hospitals would then send any extra charges back to the Department of Homeland Security.

One hospital in which he worked reported a profit of $220,000 in the OB-GYN department compared to prior years, where losses were commonplace, largely due to the lucrative guaranteed government payments.

The costs associated with this “free” healthcare are staggering.

He treated an undocumented migrant from Honduras who arrived in labor and gave birth to a baby with severe congenital defects. Both mother and child had to be airlifted to Tucson, Arizona, for multiple surgeries, costing an estimated more than $1 million.

Fortunately, the child survived, but America simply cannot afford to extend expensive healthcare to every ailing individual on the planet.

There must be limits, or as Kennedy warned, the ship is bound to sink.

Hosp-care crossers

Despite this, as my doctor source noted, he encountered illegal migrants with chronic conditions who specifically crossed the border to access advanced healthcare, while American taxpayers and insured citizens face increasingly long wait times.

One American patient, the pregnant wife of a rancher, came in experiencing preeclampsia and dangerously high blood pressure of 220/120 — classified as a hypertensive emergency risking mom and baby’s lives.

She waited in the emergency room triage area behind three undocumented migrants in a line that would have lasted over three hours, had the doctor not recognized the urgency and intervened, only to be reprimanded later for bypassing the queue.

The strain on limited healthcare resources is just one of the many issues associated with illegal migration, which also encompasses child sex trafficking and the influx of violent foreign criminals.

While this unfolds, the left criticizes President Trump for fulfilling his electoral promise to rectify Joe Biden’s mess, insinuating that the U.S. economy relies on taxpayer-subsidized labor.

Among the most vocal dissenters has been the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, condemning Trump’s border protection and mass deportation initiatives as “unacceptable,” “appalling,” and “contrary to American and Christian values.”

Pope Francis has gone even further, labeling the mass deportations as a “disgrace” that would force “the poor wretches who have nothing” to bear the burden of global inequalities.

Nevertheless, their perception of unconditional access to America for the impoverished worldwide is not strongly founded in church doctrine, as many Catholics have highlighted.

Notably, Robert Cardinal Sarah, an influential Guinean figure and former prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship at the Vatican, expressed to Nico Spuntoni in Italian publication Il Tempo that “Current migration patterns represent a new form of slavery or human trafficking, similar to arms trafficking.”

European ‘extinction’

Cardinal Sarah, a close acquaintance of the late Pope Benedict XVI, stated that Europe is on the verge of “extinction, both culturally and demographically,” having deviated from its Christian foundations.

However, he added, “as an African man, I maintain that the solution cannot lie in the ‘ethnic replacement’ through uncontrolled immigration, which contributes to impoverishing African nations and depriving them of their young populations.”

Likewise, Vice President J.D. Vance, a Catholic convert, voiced his disappointment over the bishops’ criticism.

“The US Conference of Catholic Bishops should reflect on whether their concerns are truly humanitarian or financially motivated when they receive over $100 million to assist in resettling illegal immigrants. We will prioritize enforcing immigration laws and safeguarding the American populace,” he told CBS News’ “Face the Nation.”

Vance’s comments referenced taxpayer dollars allocated to Catholic charities and other NGOs that facilitate human smuggling across the border.

This was one of the key reasons behind Trump’s recent freeze on federal grants, aiming to align funding with the administration’s priorities, particularly those related to border security, diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as climate policy.

America stands as the most charitable nation globally.

But it becomes ineffectual if, as Kennedy warns, the entire ship goes down.