• Opinion | With Coronavirus, ‘Health Care for Some’ Is a Recipe for Disaster - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/06/opinion/coronavirus-immigrants-health.html

    L’idéologie contre la santé publique

    Doctors and immigration advocates have long worried that the public charge rule would present a grave public health danger. The rule could deter millions of noncitizens — even those who were not technically subject to its provisions — from using programs like Medicaid, WIC and SNAP or from seeking medical care of any kind, lest they imperil their immigration status. That kind of avoidance would make those groups less healthy and thus more susceptible to the vagaries of, say, an infectious disease outbreak.

    The administration was not blind to those risks. When it first proposed the new rule, officials at the Department of Homeland Security noted that it could very well lead to worse health outcomes for immigrants, especially infants, children and women who were pregnant or nursing. Yes, they acknowledged, vaccination rates might fall as a direct result of what they were proposing. Yes, communicable diseases might become more prevalent. But, the agency said, the new regulations were essential to a goal more important than protecting public health: making immigrants “self-sufficient.”

    Many changes to law and policy have been undertaken in the past several years under the banner of “self-sufficiency” and its close cousin “personal responsibility.” Social safety net programs like SNAP and TANF have been cut; work requirements have removed thousands of people from Medicaid; and immigrant communities have been subject to a roster of anti-immigrant policies — not just the public charge rule, but also family separations and abysmal treatment of detained migrants at the border, and ICE raids and mass deportations at home.

    #Santé_publique #Immigration #Etats-Unis #Responsabilité_personnelle