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As of July 1, 2006, only citizens can receive Medicaid. While ERs still have to provide services to everyone who enters, that is a Federal law and applies to all of us, in every state.

A distinction without a difference, ERs are being used by illegals as clinics for routine care. What is your reference on the July 1, 2006 cutoff for Medicaid?

Deficit Reduction Act of 2005. Passed late last year in Congress, signed by POTUS in February 2006, takes effect July, 1, 2006.

I am not clear what other entitlements are scheduled to be limited to citizens. The ability to attend public school is enforced by a SCOTUS ruling to which I do not have an exact reference. Ditto access to the ER, although Hill-Burton mandated 13% indigent care for any facility receiving Federal funds. However, I know that when ERs are overloaded, they shut down, delay seeing people with minor problems or discourage the entire clan from acccompaning the patient by removing waiting rooms. If the treatment needed is a prescription, people without Medicaid are not going to fill them or return. Even ERs run out of samples eventually.

Back in the 1990s, my mother, who lived in Las Vegas, decided she was very ill, even though her physician didn't think she needed to come into the ER. Miffed, she called an ambulance to take her to the ER, which she could afford because my father was on a Federal pension. When she got there, she was placed on a gurney and left to wait. Finally, she was able to ask an orderly why she wasn't being seen. He gestured to all those waiting, some with obvious injuries, heart attacks, etc, and said:"This is the way it is now." She got up off her gurney and called a cab and went home. She waited til morning, called her physician and made an appointment.

If she was discouraged from using the ER on a generous health insurance plan, I can only imagine what an illegal with no English must feel having to wait hours in uncomfortable surroundings if they aren't unconscious or at death's door.

If the hospitals along the border are closing down, it is difficult to understand how people with minor problems can still use them as clinics.