By Tate Miller
The Center Square

The American First Policy Institute is calling on Congress to prioritize American patients over illegal aliens and expressed its disapproval toward the illegal alien-favoring proposal to reverse Health Savings Account reforms, while also insisting the government must be reopened.

Director of Homeland Security policy at the America First Policy Institute Cooper Smith told the Center Square: “The American people deserve to be represented in Washington, but unfortunately the progressive left in Congress won’t budge on open borders policies that benefit people with no legal right to be here.”

America First Policy Institute (AFPI) is a non-profit and non-partisan research institute, as stated on its website.

“The government should be re-opened, and Congress should return to the people’s business,” Smith said.

AFPI director of Healthy America policy & senior director of policy Hannah Anderson told The Center Square that rolling back Working Family Tax Cuts (WFTC) reforms “would mean higher costs, fewer choices, and a return to a system that puts bureaucracy ahead of patients.”

The WFTC “included commonsense reforms to Make Americans Healthy Again, including expanding Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) to cover previously excluded Obamacare plans,” Anderson said.

“HSAs are a lifeline for families trapped in these costly Obamacare plans, that can have deductibles as high as $9,000,” Anderson said.

In an AFPI statement, Anderson said that instead of letting “commonsense” WFTC reforms take effect, “liberals are trying to push healthcare for illegal aliens, leaving American families stuck in limbo while Washington remains closed.”

Anderson additionally said in a statement that “liberals in Congress” are using the government shutdown “as leverage to redirect federal Medicaid dollars to fund healthcare for illegal immigrants” and “holding the government hostage in order to put American patients last.”

“Radicals in Congress must reopen the government and prioritize American patients over partisan spending schemes,” Anderson said.

Senior Research Fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Richard and Helen DeVos Center for Human Flourishing Nina Schaefer told The Center Square that she agrees American patients should be prioritized over illegal aliens.

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill “properly closed definitional loopholes that the Biden administration exploited to allow federal taxpayer funding for illegals,” Schaefer said.

“Government funded programs, like Medicaid, provided critical care to many Americans yet bloated enrollment in these programs means less services for those who need it most,” Schaefer said.

Schaefer also told The Center Square that HSAs “provide American health care consumers and patients with the financial flexibility to access care and services that meet their specific needs.”

The Big Beautiful Bill “made HSAs more available in the Obamacare Exchanges and more useable for services, such as for Direct Primary Care,” Schaefer said.