Vice President JD Vance is still defending his false claim that Democrats shut down the federal government to give health care to undocumented immigrants — and on Wednesday, he added a new spin.
According to the vice president, wait times in emergency rooms have increased recently because, thanks to a Biden administration rule, he said, undocumented immigrants are accessing medical services at ERs for free. He said that the Trump administration has since “turned off that money spigot.”
Factually, however, a 1986 law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan, requires nearly all hospitals to provide emergency services to anyone in need of them, regardless of their ability to pay. Immigration or citizenship status is not supposed to factor into decisions about whom medical professionals treat.
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The vice president on Wednesday offered a different perspective, declaring, “if you’re an American citizen, you’ve been to a hospital in the last few years, you probably noticed that wait times are especially large, and very often somebody who’s there in the emergency room, waiting, is an illegal alien, very often a person who can’t even speak English.”
“Why do those people get health care benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens?” he asked. “The answer is a decision made by the Biden administration that the Trump administration working with Congressional Republicans undid. We turned off that money spigot to health care funding for illegal aliens.”
In large part, hospitals absorb the cost of treating undocumented immigrants who cannot afford to pay for emergency services. Some federal emergency Medicaid funds may reimburse a portion of those costs during certain life-threatening emergencies.
NBC News reported on Wednesday that “U.S. law prohibits federal health care benefits for undocumented immigrants. Democrats want to return benefits for those with lawful presence, like DACA recipients and asylum-seekers.”
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Democrats, Vance falsely claimed on Wednesday, “shut down the government because we won’t give billions of dollars in health care funding for illegal aliens. That is what actually happened.”
“To the American people who are watching,” he also claimed, “the reason your government is shut down at this very minute is because despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of Congressional Republicans — and even a few moderate Democrats who supported opening the government — the Chuck Schumer/AOC wing of the Democratic party shutdown the government because they said to us, ‘We will open the government but only if you give billions of dollars of funding for health care for illegal aliens.’ That’s a ridiculous proposition.”
Ignoring the legal requirements for treating emergency patients, Vance said: “There’s a lot of emergency health care at hospitals that are provided to illegal aliens that was funded by the federal government. We turned off that funding because of course we want American citizens to benefit from those hospital services, not to be taxed and then to have those hospital services go to illegal aliens.”
Vance: “If you’re an American citizen and you’ve been to the hospital in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that wait times are especially large and very often somebody who’s there in the ER is an illegal alien. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals… pic.twitter.com/oWF7oCSLqK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2025
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Image via Reuters
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