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ACA reversal/change?


DawnM
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How many people with American passports (and all their tax documentation in order--you have to file every year if you're American) live in poverty in third world countries? They'd be better off scraping up the airfare and moving long before they got sick. I don't know about the UK, are there many people with the right of abode living in poverty abroad?

 

I don't know.  As I said, it's something to think about.  The UK used to get a fair number of people flying in for treatment based on citizenship before the rules were clarified.

 

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From a humane perspective, I could never justify refusing healthcare to anyone regardless of immigration status.

 

For reference, the UK treats everyone who turns up at hospital, regardless of ability to pay.  However, foreigners will be billed.  And people who can't pay and aren't resident will be treated and stabilised, rather than given long term treatment.  This is the theory - I think that the regulations are often winked at, because the NHS doesn't have a tradition of demanding cash, and doesn't always follow through.

Edited by Laura Corin
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For reference, the UK treats everyone who turns up at hospital, regardless of ability to pay.  However, foreigners will be billed.  And people who can't pay and aren't resident will be treated and stabilised, rather than given long term treatment.  This is the theory - I think that the regulations are often winked at, because the NHS doesn't have a tradition of demanding cash, and doesn't always follow through.

 

Things have probably changed since the 1980s but when I was visiting England in 1986 I developed an allergic rash to something. I went to a local doctor and though I was prepared to either pay up front or be billed, I never was. The doctor told me that as a visitor I wasn't going to be charged. I can understand paying for non-emergency treatment and based on travel books I read I did expect to pay for my doctor visit, but I only had to pay for the cream I was prescribed. My situation wasn't an emergency. 

 

I think it's disgraceful that here in the U.S. we bill foreign visitors for emergency treatment, especially if the cause wasn't the foreigner's fault (such as a mugging or other crime related injury).

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Things have probably changed since the 1980s but when I was visiting England in 1986 I developed an allergic rash to something. I went to a local doctor and though I was prepared to either pay up front or be billed, I never was. The doctor told me that as a visitor I wasn't going to be charged. I can understand paying for non-emergency treatment and based on travel books I read I did expect to pay for my doctor visit, but I only had to pay for the cream I was prescribed. My situation wasn't an emergency. 

 

I think it's disgraceful that here in the U.S. we bill foreign visitors for emergency treatment, especially if the cause wasn't the foreigner's fault (such as a mugging or other crime related injury).

 

No, things have changed.  We do bill people for emergency treatment, but the NHS is just not set up to pursue debts, so I suspect it's not very efficient.

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Things have probably changed since the 1980s but when I was visiting England in 1986 I developed an allergic rash to something. I went to a local doctor and though I was prepared to either pay up front or be billed, I never was. The doctor told me that as a visitor I wasn't going to be charged. I can understand paying for non-emergency treatment and based on travel books I read I did expect to pay for my doctor visit, but I only had to pay for the cream I was prescribed. My situation wasn't an emergency.

 

I think it's disgraceful that here in the U.S. we bill foreign visitors for emergency treatment, especially if the cause wasn't the foreigner's fault (such as a mugging or other crime related injury).

We bill citizens for emergency treatment as well... Edited by maize
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FYI, your kids ARE eligible to be President.

 

The "natural born citizen" phrase means that, at the time of their birth, they were born into automatic citizenship. Thus, any child born to a US citizen abroad (or in Hawaii) is a "natural born citizen". This is a nearly universal agreement among constitutional scholars. 

 

See: Ted Cruz. Born in Canada. 

 

And, yes, indeed, this means all that craziness about where Obama was born was *always* irrelevant.

 

Are you shocked? Yes, I was, too. 

Has this been definitively tested in the courts?

 

Because I learned it the other way in civics when I was a kid.

 

The way I learned it was, no matter where you were born you were an American citizen if one of your parents was, as long as you didn't renounce your citizenship.  BUT, if you were not physically born in the US you could not become president. 

 

I remember this quite vividly because we all concluded that the solution if you happened to be overseas and giving birth was to go straight to the local American embassy and give birth there, since technically it's considered a little piece of American soil.

 

I know that I'm not alone in this, and I am not sure that I ever heard that it was definitively resolved, in the case of Ted Cruz for instance.

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ACA was doomed from the start. If we can't get a handle on monopoly healthcare practices (i.e., price fixing) which intertwine pharma, insurance, and government, we are simply rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. There is no reason why we should pay hundreds (scratch that - thousands) of dollars for a medicine or procedure that is available to the rest of the world for a fraction of that. This is the root of the problem. We have existing laws that would remedy this if they were enforced.

Edited by Vida Winter
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Has this been definitively tested in the courts?

 

Because I learned it the other way in civics when I was a kid.

 

The way I learned it was, no matter where you were born you were an American citizen if one of your parents was, as long as you didn't renounce your citizenship.  BUT, if you were not physically born in the US you could not become president. 

 

I don't know that there has been a court decision, but there was bipartisan agreement that John McCain, who was born in the Panama Canal Zone, when there was such a thing, counted as a "natural born citizen", and was eligible to be President.

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Here's a good treatment of the natural born citizen clause:

http://harvardlawreview.org/2015/03/on-the-meaning-of-natural-born-citizen/

 

The interpretation that a person must be born in the US is a common misconception without any legal justification.

 

Yes.  My sons are natural born US citizens (born in London and Hong Kong respectively) because they are the children of an American parent who has been resident in the US (proof of this was required when they were registered at the US embassy shortly after birth).  That's it.  They can be president.

 

What they can't do (at present) is pass on their US citizenship to their children, because they have not yet been resident in the US themselves.  As it currently stands they will be able to pass their UK citizenship on, because they are resident here (and Calvin was born here).

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