While President Obama and other Democrats in the nation’s capital have emphasized throughout the years that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) does not offer coverage to undocumented immigrants, California Democrats are moving in the opposite direction.

Democrats in Sacramento are pushing legislation that will allow undocumented residents of the Golden State to buy insurance through Covered California, the state-run PPACA marketplace.

Even if the law is approved, its effect is constrained by the fact that undocumented customers will not be allowed to tap into the federal subsidies that 85 percent of other marketplace customers take advantage of. A recent analysis done by Covered California projected that 50,000 new customers would enter the marketplace if the bill passes.

Considering that undocumented immigrants typically have low or moderate incomes, it appears unlikely that many of them would be able to afford the policies without subsidies. And it also suggests that it will be easier for Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, to sign.

“The bill, at least in its current state, doesn’t have a large price tag, so it seems possible he’d approve it,” Shannon McConville, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California, told Kaiser Health News. “But you can never know for sure.”

A more significant development, perhaps, was the recent approval of a state law that will allow undocumented children to participate in Medi-Cal, the state Medicaid program.

Passage of the proposed law would put the Obama administration in an awkward political position, since the only concrete action the state law proposes is requesting that the federal government exempt California from the current ban on extending PPACA plans to those who are not in the country legally.

Obama has presided over more deportations than any president in U.S. history, but he has been pilloried by Republicans as being lax on the issue. For the administration to accept coverage for undocumented immigrants would vindicate Rep. Joe Wilson, R-SC, who committed an unprecedented breach of Congressional decorum during Obama’s 2010 State of the Union address by shouting, “You lie!” moments after Obama insisted that the PPACA would not cover those without legal status.

In the midst of a campaign driven largely by anti-immigration populism, most notably from Donald Trump, it might seem obvious that Democrats would stay away from any action that might brand them as too generous to undocumented workers.

But in fact, it’s not clear what action would be politically wise. As much as anti-immigrant sentiment has been a boon to Trump in the GOP primary, it also threatens to devastate the GOP’s attempts to gain ground among Latino voters, who constitute the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. electorate.

Instant Insights /

California Dems push PPACA plans for undocumented immigrants

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