A new "public health fund" created under Obamacare has turned into a political slush fund, financing projects that have little to do with providing affordable health care to Americans, according to a senior House lawmaker, former Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.
In a blistering letter to House Appropriations Committee Chairman Harold Rogers, Rep. Smith, a 10-term Texas Republican, wrote that the Prevention and Public Health Fund created under the 2010 healthcare overhaul is being used to finance television ads promoting amnesty programs for illegal aliens.
Smith pointed to a report by CNS News that the Department of Health and Human Services gave a $15 million grant to an organization called the California Endowment, a vocal advocate for Obamacare. Newsbusters (a media watchdog group which, like CNS News, is part of the Media Research Center) reported that one advertisement sponsored by the California Endowment which aired on the Spanish-language television outlet Univision "focuses not on health care, but rather on reminding undocumented [illegal] immigrants to renew their Deferred Action for Child Arrivals (DACA) permits."
The DACA program is an Obama Administration initiative awarding renewable two-year grants of legal status
— including Social Security numbers and work cards
— to illegals who say they arrived in the United States prior to their 16th birthday. The administration says it is using its "prosecutorial" discretion" over when to arrest and deport those illegally in the country. Critics counter that the implementation of DACA is a violation of the Constitution: President Obama could not persuade Congress to enact amnesty into law, so he usurped lawmakers’ powers and acted unilaterally.
According to Smith, use of Obamacare money to promote DACA should be objectionable to opponents and supporters of the healthcare law.
"Regardless of how one feels about Obamacare, taxpayer money being spent to remind undocumented immigrants to renew their DACA permits does not promote healthcare," he wrote in his letter to Rogers. "This is just one example of the wasteful and unaccountable spending created by the prevention and Public Health Fund."