Baltimore A compromise of sorts seems to have been reached in Massachusetts to provide some form of health coverage for the 31,000 LEGAL immigrants in the state that had been bounced off the rolls as a cost savings measure. The other victim of this cost cutting were the poor families whose automatic enrollment in the program ceased so that the state could save an equal amount of money by forcing them to go through the arduous application process for benefits and cynically knowing that enough families would not be able to navigate the bureaucracy that that they would save $65 million in that way. Immigrant groups like the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition saw this as a “temporary” solution and a not totally satisfactory one. Voices for the poor on their being the brunt of the other part of this cost saving were silent, as near as I can tell, yet this is a life and death question for them as well.
