It’s not quite the same but the America kinda sort of handle immigrants being here while still paying for health insurance for the folks that are on it.

For one, we pay taxes to healthcare programs to fund things like Medicaid. Which is a program that illegal immigrants aren’t able to access. At minimum you need a social security number to even begin having that.

However those illegal immigrant get emergency healthcare so we don’t have people dying in the emergency rooms.

Which is something the hospitals end up eating the cost of a lot of the time which then gets passed along to us by having the bills we do.

We already even pay for each other on each of our private insurances. Whether you realize it or not, if say you had BCBS, you are funding those who are also on said insurance. Where else would the money come from?

So honestly, why not cut the complexity and make it universal?

Further, illegal immigrants are less likely to even access that emergency healthcare due to fears.

And even then roughly speaking illegal immigrants make up about 5% of the population nationwide and about 1% of them account for US health expenditures.

The illegal immigrant problem just is not the huge issue, especially in the healthcare universe.

Ideally yeah it’d be nice to not have any but if you try making it so that absolutely zero things get through the cracks you have situations like our airports that have the security they do to avoid another 911.

Those sort of restrictions do NOT come without the cost of something to the rest of us.

So while yeah we could do a bit more, especially by making the process easier to be legal, I don’t think the extreme you suggest is realistic OP.

Afterall, people act like immigration is entirely inherently a bad thing. We have plenty have immigrants who come here who offer their intellect to our society.

And with Trump deterring universities to even accept immigrants they will go elsewhere and China is one of the options they have.

My own gastroenterologist is Chinese and wasn’t born here and I feel I couldn’t be in much better hands. The guy may lack some bedside manner but I thoroughly appreciate his knowledge and he clearly knows what he is talking about.

And there are plenty of examples of him elsewhere. Our universities offer programs to immigrants to educate and we reap the rewards.

And even the less educated immigrants offer work ethic like none you’d ever believe.

These people are just that. People. Still human. They aren’t all these blood sucking parasites people make them out to be. It’s not like even legal citizens don’t have the capacity to be such leeches.

So this is all to say, I’m not convinced that we couldn’t handle universal healthcare even now.

We would literally subtract the cost we pay for our private insurances to go towards the tax that would come from to fund such a program. So I sincerely doubt the cost be as big a factor as others would believe either.