Kris Kobach is pretty happy with himself these days. He just got 147,000 people declared ineligible for health coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
The victory is all the sweeter for Kobach because they’re all immigrants — one of several classes of people Kobach dedicates his life to oppressing — and 4,350 of them are our Kansas neighbors.
Kobach won a court decision this week in North Dakota that denies ACA benefits to the class of immigrants known as “Dreamers” — as in the American dream.
They’re young adults who were brought into the country as children by their parents, through no fault of their own.
They’ve grown up here, been educated in our school systems and colleges, and many have put down roots with jobs, marriages and children of their own.
Back in 2012, the federal government realized it didn’t make sense to try to kick them out, because they’re productive workers and taxpayers providing an estimated $6.2 billion in federal taxes and $3.3 billion in state and local taxes each year.
So the government created DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a renewable permit that allows Dreamers with clean records to stay and work in the United States.
Two years earlier, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed the ACA, widely known as Obamacare, creating insurance exchanges where people with lower incomes can buy health insurance that’s partially subsidized by the federal government.
DACA recipients were excluded from ACA benefits in a regulation established by the Department of Health and Human Services in 2012.
Last year, the Biden administration started the process to change the rule so Dreamers would be considered “lawfully present” in the U.S. for the purpose of health insurance.
That offended Kobach, so he’s been leading a coalition of 19 states opposing the rule change, while 19 other states popped up to defend it.
A North Dakota federal court judge on Monday issued an injunction stopping the new rule from going into effect.
The judge, Daniel M. Traynor, is a former defense lawyer for insurance companies and was appointed to the bench by Donald Trump. The first thing to be decided was whether the case should be heard in North Dakota in the first place.
According to court records, there are only 126 DACA recipients in North Dakota — only Montana has fewer — so any impact they have there would be minimal.
But Traynor dismissed the jurisdiction question.
