After Years of Refusal, the Media Acknowledges the Reality of Illegal Immigration and Healthcare

If you wait long enough, the media will eventually concede that conservatives had it right. The caveat is that they’ll acknowledge this only when it serves their narrative. This scenario is unfolding in the context of illegal immigration and taxpayer-funded healthcare.

For more than ten years, the established position has been to label anyone on the right who claims that illegal immigrants receive taxpayer-funded healthcare as spreaders of “disinformation.” Remember when Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) famously shouted “you lie” during one of Barack Obama’s State of the Union speeches, only to be criticized by every major media outlet?

Now, his vindication is at hand as the recent GOP reconciliation package includes cuts to Medicaid funding for illegal immigrants, prompting the media to reconsider their stance.

In Illinois, adult immigrants ages 42-64 without legal status have lost their health care to save an estimated $404 million.https://t.co/DFqIYpIjds

— Chicago Tribune (@chicagotribune) July 19, 2025

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— Stephen L. Miller (@redsteeze) July 20, 2025

Wait a second. I have been assured that illegal immigrants don’t receive Medicaid and that the mere suggestion is a wild-eyed, crazy conspiracy theory. Was I lied to? The answer is yes, we were all lied to. 

“It changed immensely, like from Earth to the heavens,” Maria said in Spanish of Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program. “Having the peace of mind of getting insurance leads me to getting sick less.”

At least seven states and the District of Columbia have offered coverage for immigrants since mostly 2020. But three of them have done an about-face, ending or limiting coverage for hundreds of thousands of immigrants who aren’t in the U.S. legally in California, Illinois and Minnesota.

You have to understand the game being played here. What those states have been doing is using matching federal funds to help prop up their state-level Medicaid systems. Through a provision of Obamacare, they’ve then expanded those systems to include illegal immigrants. All the while, they’ve maintained deniability by playing the semantic game of insisting they only have access to the state-level program, even though federal funds subsidize it. 

It’s a very similar scheme to what Planned Parenthood has done. Whenever someone points out that the Hyde Amendment prohibits federal funds from going to abortions, the left-wing response is always that those funds are earmarked for other services. But money is fungible, and if you prop up one part of an entity, that allows them to manipulate the supposed guardrails. Whether any federal funding goes down on a spreadsheet as having “paid for this specific abortion” is irrelevant when the money helps keep the abortion mill open. 

But with the recent revisions to Medicaid funding passed as part of the reconciliation package, Democrat-led states simply can’t make the math work and are being forced to end eligibility for illegal immigrants. Not that the math worked before. California, for example, was already facing a $12 billion deficit, an outcome Republicans warned would happen. Naturally, they were lambasted and ignored by the press at the time.