A new Wall Street Journal Survey showed that 20 out of the 25 counties in the U.S. with the highest levels of illegal aliens are using state funds to provide healthcare for local illegal aliens. Participants in these programs, regardless of immigration status, receive healthcare services such as doctor visits, shots, prescription drugs, lab tests and surgeries for free or at an extremely reduced cost paid for by the local taxpayers.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that around one-quarter of the approximately 30 million uninsured people in the U.S. are illegal aliens and federal policies have prohibited illegal aliens from using the Affordable Care Act to obtain healthcare due to the high costs.

For all 20 counties that were part of the survey it cost them a total of over $1 billion a year to provide nonemergency care for at least 750,000 illegal aliens. The majority of these bills were paid for from the local funds of those communities.

Andreas Borgeas, a member of the board of supervisors in Fresno County, CA, said that providing illegal aliens with healthcare has “created an ongoing entitlement that’s going to be difficult to sustain.”

Berkeley’s Center for Labor Research and Education estimates that California will have around 1.5 million adult immigrants in 2019 and to provide Medicaid alone to these who meet the program’s low-income criteria would cost the state $400 million more a year.

This subject has been a huge part of the 2016 presidential debate with Republican candidate’s Ted Cruz and Donald Trump saying they would continue the federal policies of not allowing illegal aliens to receive healthcare coverage while Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would like to offer illegal aliens healthcare coverage and eventually citizenship. You can view their

Read more on this story at The Wall Street Journal.