Another Solution to the Health Care Crisis – Free Care for Illegal Farm Workers
Senators Claire Ayer and Harold Giard of (both D-Addison) have cosponsored a bill to provide free health care to illegal immigrants, specifically in the farming and food service sectors. During an interview with Vermont Public Radio Luz Felix-Marquez, a UVM medical student who helped establish a mobile health clinic for the farmworkers, said: “And it’s not that they don’t realize that that they’re sick. It’s just that whatever they’re experiencing isn’t impeding their work. And until it impedes their work, that’s when they’re going to access care.” Despite assurances by area farmers that they’re treating their foreign workers well, this sure sounds like exploitation. Neither Sen. Ayer nor Felix-Marquez said who was paying under the present system, but there’s no doubt who’s going to pay under Ayer’s plan.
Sen. Ayer: “The jobs that very often illegal migrant workers have are jobs that Vermonters don’t want. It isn’t that they’re displacing people, and that eventually we’ll take back the jobs. People don’t want them. So we need them to keep our dairy economy, our ski economy, and in some cases our food service economy going. We need them. It’s a fact of life, and we need to take care of them, too.”
The Ayer/Giard plan also ignores the fact that the farmers, and perhaps some of the outreach workers as well, are felons under federal law. (See 8 USC §1324) Before we go down this road, perhaps it’s time to do a study to see if Vermonters would do these jobs if they were paid a living wage and got free health care.