A recent poll by the Siena Research Institute included a question parroting widely discredited Republican talking points on the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), spreading misinformation and effectively biasing the results of a survey that received extensive coverage in media outlets including Politico, Fox News, and the New York Post.

Specifically, Siena asked voters the following question: “The bill also cuts Medicaid funding for illegal immigrants. Are you in favor of or opposed to New York State continuing to provide health care services to illegal immigrants living in New York at an estimated cost of three billion dollars per year?”

The first sentence of this assertion is unambiguously false and has been thoroughly debunked. Undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for federally funded Medicaid, and OBBBA did nothing to change that. New York does cover a small number of undocumented people — primarily children — using exclusively state dollars, and OBBBA will not change that, either. (The House version of the bill would have punished states such as New York that cover undocumented children by cutting Medicaid funding to US citizens on Medicaid in those states, but this provision was ruled ineligible for inclusion in the Senate bill.)

Instead, as FPI has previously reported, OBBBA eliminates federal funding for 750,000 legal immigrants New York State — primarily Green Card holders but also applicants for refugee and asylum status, victims of human trafficking, and low-income people on work and student visas, among others. Many of these lawfully-present immigrants are currently enrolled in the federally funded New York Essential Plan, but OBBBA will eliminate that funding. (In most other states this population receives federally subsidized coverage through the Affordable Care Act exchange — but OBBBA eliminates that source of coverage, too.) In New York, lawfully present immigrants have a constitutional right to Medicaid coverage if they meet income requirements, so 500,000 of the immigrants stripped of federal healthcare funding by OBBBA will receive state-funded Medicaid at a cost of $3 billion per year to New York State taxpayers. The remaining 250,000 will simply become uninsured.

It is not surprising that New York Republicans including Elise Stefanik and Mike Lawler are attempting to misrepresent OBBBA as targeting undocumented immigrants; that is easier to defend than the bill’s actual provisions, which will strip lawful immigrants of healthcare, burden New York taxpayers with the task of paying for Trump’s tax cuts, and lead to rural hospital closures across the state. But it is mystifying that a widely respected pollster such as Siena would repeat Republican talking points in a purportedly neutral poll asking about voters’ preferred response to OBBBA. Biased surveys yield biased results, and New York policymakers would be wise to question a poll that contains such obvious misrepresentations.