For DACA recipients, U.S. life under Joe Biden just keeps getting better and better.

Here's the latest from the Washington Examiner:

President Joe Biden is reportedly set to expand the health plans available to hundreds of thousands of people who illegally immigrated to the United States as children.

Biden's decision will allow participants in the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program to access government-funded health insurance programs such as Medicaid and Obamacare's health insurance exchanges, officials reportedly told the Associated Press. A formal announcement is expected on Thursday.

DACA was announced in 2012 and allows participants to work legally. However, recipients don't have full legal status and are denied access to multiple government benefits given to citizens.

In particular, DACA recipients are disqualified from government-subsidized health insurance because they lack a "lawful presence" in the U.S.

Seems the camel's nose under the tent of the DACA executive order, which was supposed to be a two-year renewable amnesty with work permits alone, has expanded into greater and greater benefits — and won't be likely to stop.

Now, there are some understandable reasons for doing this, at least from the Democrats' and the migrants' point of view.

Illegals clog up emergency rooms if they don't have health insurance when they get sick, driving many hospitals into bankruptcy from their unpaid bills.  We already know that that is happening in the Southwest.

Second, the DACA kids, who may have shelled out $600-plus for the DACA application fee, or gotten an NGO or university to pay it for them, can't buy subsidized insurance on the Obamacare exchanges, or get health insurance for free if they qualify for Medicaid, which a large percentage of the estimated 580,000 of them do.  Asylum-seekers, by contrast, do get it all for free — paying no application fee for their usually invalid asylum claims, and getting free health care as well.  That includes the two to five million recent border-crossers who've rolled in from the Biden border surge.  The DACA kids, by contrast, must be feeling mighty screwed over, given the free ride the Biden border-surgers are walking off with.

President Obama signed his original executive order creating DACA against significant political headwinds in 2012, defensively insisting that it was just a temporary little stopgap measure, a crumb, some breathing space until "comprehensive immigration reform" (read: amnesty) could be enacted.

Now, let's be clear — this is not amnesty, this is not immunity.  This is not a path to citizenship.  It's not a permanent fix.  This is a temporary stopgap measure that lets us focus our resources wisely while giving a degree of relief and hope to talented, driven, patriotic young people.  It is —

Biden, of course, with this measure, shows intent to institutionalize DACA as a big sprawling government program that continuously adds new staff and services for this class of illegals as a political constituency.

That's evident enough in this Kaiser Family Foundation study, finding that a significant portion of the DACA population already has health insurance.  Someone else may be paying for it, such as the State of California, or other states that have volunteered to pay for such things, or a legally employed relative who can put them on his insurance plan until age 26, or the federally funded universities the DACA kids may attend, or some employers, or they may be paying full fare themselves from private companies for the tax breaks if they pay taxes.  What's more, since DACA recipients are by definition young, they are probably like many young people throughout the country, meaning they could buy health insurance, but as healthy young people, they are unlikely to use it, and therefore, they don't want to. 

But if all of these factors are the case, that's a lot of mitigating factors.  So why is Joe Biden handing it out for free?  Why isn't he at least billing the DACA recipients' host countries for the cost instead of dumping it onto the U.S. taxpayer?  What we see here is simply gravy to a favored constituency, with a bailout to the blue states that have overcommitted to pay for illegals' "free" health care, and a big price tag for the taxpayers attached.

The Daily Kos, a far-left blog that is still around, observed that many but not all of the DACA kids would probably help themselves:

There's roughly 580,000 immigrants who have DACA status as of today. While all of them would presumably become eligible for ACA enrollment (and, therefore, federal ACA subsidies) via the change in their residency status, that doesn't mean 580K new ACA exchange enrollees. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, around 39% of them are currently uninsured, or roughly ~230,000, give or take.The rest have other types of healthcare coverage just like most other Americans do.

Even among those ~230K, not all of them will necessarily qualify for financial subsidies as some may have too high an income, although I suspect that number will be minimal among this population. And of course some of them will become eligible for Medicaid instead. On the other hand, some of the other ~350K DACA recipients who are currently categorized as "insured" may have terrible coverage via short-term or other types of "junk" plans and thus may become eligible for ACA/Medicaid coverage as well.

As these things go, count on the migrants to take the least expensive, most subsidized option, because, like anyone, they respond to proffered incentives.  That saddles the taxpayers with the most debt, and the Washington Examiner noted that the cost of Biden's new health care giveaway to the foreigners is unknown.  The Daily Kos report noted that even if all don't enroll, the number of people to be suddenly covered through the taxpayer-subsidized exchanges would be significant — equivalent to a state the size of Iowa or West Virginia.

Sound like a bill the U.S. is in a position to pay?

It's not just that this is a significant expense for a low-priority problem here.  It's also a slap in the face to American citizens, whom Biden is currently saddling with higher and higher debt.  If my unsubsidized health care bill costs me $1,400 a month, then we can assume that the subsidized costs of that amount are a percentage of a figure like that, or if the DACA recipient goes on Medicaid and gets an entirely free ride, Biden will effectively make his health care giveaway a $10,000–$20,000 gift to DACA recipients.  What's more, any subsidy to DACA foreigners will likely show up in the health care bills of those who have to pay their health care costs themselves as insurance companies shift the cost of the discount health care onto the paying customers.  Subsidies don't usually cover everything, so paying Americans can look forward to higher insurance bills, as if Bidenflation's damage were not already enough.  Health care costs on citizens required to buy the health care in the past year rose between 5% and 14% for those who buy their insurance on the exchanges.  Biden, of course, has done nothing about that.  That's not even on his radar.

Every move Biden makes saddles the taxpayers with higher and higher costs and debt burdens — there's his California water-rationing plan, which will drive water bills in the Southwest sky-high, making even the water-rich years into drought years.  There is his sneaky electric car mandate to force auto manufacturers into offering only high-priced electric cars on the market, pricing out the middle class who can't afford those unreliable vehicles, converting America's roads and highways to solely rich men's playthings once again.

Yet for illegal aliens, Biden keeps lowering the cost, raising the incentives, handing out the gifts.  As life gets better and better for illegal aliens in the States, it gets worse and worse for everyone else.  Biden's priorities are utterly backwards, unless one interprets it as his being utterly hostile to American voters.  Many people already suspect this, but this giveaway to foreigners utterly nails it.

Image: Screen shot from NBC Nightly News via YouTube.