By Bobby Jindal and Hannah Anderson

The government shutdown threatens to give dead people Medicaid benefits. Yes, you read that correctly. The radical and partisan proposal to reopen the government insists on repealing the provisions of the “Working Families Tax Cut” legislation to ensure that the dollars, doctors, and care are diverted to the people most in need: the recently deceased.

We’re being facetious, but you get the point. The radical Left was so desperate to fulfill its base’s wishes in giving healthcare to illegal immigrants that Democrats proposed repealing the full suite of pro-patient reforms in the WFTC bill, including the very commonsense measure of ensuring that states do not get ongoing federal funding for those no longer alive. The Department of Government Efficiency found 9.9 million Americans when investigating the number of deceased people still on Social Security’s database. States should do the same for Medicaid, ensuring that every dollar available goes to the most vulnerable Americans and is not lost to waste, fraud, and abuse.

But it doesn’t end there. In their push to spend money on illegal immigrant healthcare, Democrats also repealed the groundbreaking Rural Health Transformation Fund. This fund, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services, makes a $50 billion capital investment into rural communities where there are roughly 30 doctors per 100,000 patients. Compare this with urban communities, which have 263 doctors per 100,000 patients. It is not America First to rob rural communities of life-saving funding in order to reopen the California loophole, using Medicaid to pay for the healthcare of illegal immigrants in the state.

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