"Need Medicaid? Show Your Passport"

Bob Herbert from The New York Times

"Advocates believe that the provision, which will require Medicaid applicants to document their U.S. citizenship (which means producing a passport or birth certificate), may be especially harmful to poor blacks, most of whom do not have passports and many of whom do not have birth certificates.

There are no exceptions to this onerous provision, not even for people with serious physical or mental impairments, including Alzheimer's disease. [...]

Many poor people live far from the cities or towns where they were born and do not have ready access to their birth certificates. And, as the center said, a large number of African-American women, especially in the South, were unable to give birth in hospitals because of racial discrimination. Many of them never received birth certificates for their babies." (more)