Can we get a giant tinfoil hat for the whole country?

Saturday morning.  C-SPAN.  Health care reform debate. And caller after caller saying, yes, we need reform -- but no way in hell should an illegal alien ever get any health care on the taxpayer's dime.

Bizarre.  Truly bizarre. 

Personally, when I'm buying food (grapes picked in California, meat packed in Nebraska, whatever) where the odds are most of the workers handling it until it landed in the supermarket cart were 'illegals,' I'd prefer that those workers were able to see a doctor when they sneeze, have a chronic cough, or run a fever.  Ditto when I'm eating at a restaurant -- go behind those swinging doors into the kitchen in almost any restaurant in an urban area and you're going to find undocumented workers.  When they spit on my salad, I'd rather not have that spit laced with mycobacterium tuberculosis.  To me it makes no sense to actively campaign for putting roadblocks to health care in the way of the people who work most intimately with our food supply.  But apparently I'm in the minority. 

And, yes, it's also the humane, decent thing to do to ensure that everyone in a society, no matter what their position (social, economic, ethnic, citizen or not) has access to health care -- but if we're not willing as a society to behave like civilized people for moral reasons, how about simple pragmatism and some enlightened self-interest?