Kobach victory gets 147,000 people denied health care coverage | Opinion

Kris Kobach is pretty happy with himself these days. He just got 147,000 people declared ineligible for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.

The victory is all the sweeter for Kobach because they’re all immigrants — one of several classes of people Kobach dedicates his life to oppressing — and 4,350 of them are our Kansas neighbors.

Kobach won a court decision this week in North Dakota that denies ACA benefits to the class of immigrants known as “Dreamers” — as in the American dream.

They’re young adults who were brought into the country as children by their parents, through no fault of their own. They’ve grown up here, been educated in our school systems and colleges, and many have put down roots with jobs, marriages and children of their own.

Back in 2012, the federal government realized it didn’t make sense to try to kick them out, because they’re productive workers and taxpayers providing an estimated $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes each year.

So the government created DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a renewable permit that allows Dreamers with clean records to stay and work in the United States.

Two years earlier, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the ACA, widely known as Obamacare, creating insurance exchanges where people with lower incomes can buy health insurance that’s partially subsidized by the federal government.

DACA recipients were excluded from ACA benefits in a regulation established by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2012. Last year, the Biden administration started the process to change the rule so Dreamers would be considered “lawfully present” in the U.S. for the purpose of health insurance.

That offended Kobach, so he’s been leading a coalition of 19 states opposing the rule change, while 19 other states popped up to defend it.

A North Dakota federal court judge on Monday issued an injunction stopping the new rule from going into effect. The judge, Daniel M. Traynor, is a former defense lawyer for insurance companies and was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump.

The first thing to be decided was whether the case should be heard in North Dakota in the first place.

According to court records, there are only 126 DACA recipients in North Dakota — only Montana has fewer — so any impact they have there would be minimal.

But Traynor dismissed the jurisdiction question. “The Court concludes, through a common-sense inference, that the powerful incentive of health care will encourage aliens who may otherwise vacate the Plaintiff States to remain,” he wrote. “Their continued presence creates a substantial risk North Dakota will suffer monetary harm via issuing (driver’s) licenses and providing education.”

Bear in mind the majority of DACA recipients pay local, state and federal taxes supporting the DMV and schools — so North Dakota could just as easily be making a profit off them. And if the new rule were upheld, they’d be eligible for the same health care wherever they lived in the U.S..

I’d conclude, through “common-sense inference” that 99.999% of Dreamers don’t want anything to do with North Dakota, and trying the case there is a shameless exercise of plaintiffs shopping for a sympathetic judge.

The most glaring flaw in the opinion is this: “The law of the land before the (new) Final Rule was that DACA recipients were not lawfully present,” Traynor wrote. “Like the Fifth Circuit stated (in another case), it is for Congress to determine who qualifies for lawful presence status, not agencies.”

The problem with that line of logic is that Congress didn’t define who has “lawful presence” when it passed the ACA. The Department of Health and Human Services created that “law of the land” when it implemented the act in 2012.

So the judge’s decision essentially states that the same agency that had the authority to establish a regulation in 2012 doesn’t have the authority to change it in 2024. How does that pass the “common sense” test?

You have to hand it to Kobach though.

He seldom, if ever, makes things any better for the people of Kansas. But he has an uncanny knack for spreading misery on minorities, so the majority looks better off in comparison.

If that’s your jam, Kobach’s your man.

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