Opponents of health care reform continue to use any desperate measure to derail reform efforts including making false claims about immigrants as well as acting like ill behaved children in a classroom.  The real lie about immigrants in health care reform is that the current health reform proposals still do not ensure legal immigrants will have equal access to Medicaid and other affordable health care options, and Congress has yet to do anything to fix this.   

As discussed in an earlier post, the current health reform proposals maintain a discriminatory and unfair policy of making legal immigrants wait five years for affordable health care options like Medicaid.  In addition, there is talk about making low and middle income legal immigrants wait five years before they are allowed access to the affordability credits or subsidies.  In today's Op-Ed in Roll Call, Dr. Ho Tran of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Health Forum (APIAHF) clearly describes the harm of forcing someone to wait five years for the health care they need.  No one should have to wait five years to have access to quality, affordable health care. 

Congress needs to ignore the attempts to distract and delay and focus on actually finishing "that great unfinished business of our society" and make sure our values of decency, humanity for one another, fairness, and recognition of the strengths of our diversity trump fear-mongering and intolerance of others.

Sonal Ambegaokar is the Health Policy Attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, a national organization that seeks to advance the rights of low income immigrants