We all just endured the annual April 15 horror of filing income taxes. The reams of paperwork and documentation are enough to drive anyone crazy, and provide a great argument for eliminating income taxes altogether.

But instead of changing the tax system, how about we simply change the rules to force the IRS to accept whatever we say we owe with no questions asked and no proof required?

That would sure make it easy to file our taxes, especially for the elderly and those who have a hard time keeping records.

It would also bankrupt the country as all the tax cheats would report they owed nothing.

As ridiculous as that sounds, this is precisely what we have been doing with Medicaid in 46 out of 50 states and due to America's unresolved illegal immigration crisis, it will bankrupt the Medicaid system as surely as the same strategy in federal taxes would bankrupt the nation at large.

Medicaid the federal health care program for our poor is, and always has been legally reserved for low-income and disabled American citizens and specified categories of legal immigrants.

It provides comprehensive health care preventive, emergency, continuing, and long-term (nursing home care) for low-income Americans who could not otherwise afford it.

It provides pediatric dental care for lower-income families who don't qualify for Medicaid proper, but who could not afford dental care for the kids otherwise. As a former dentist who participated in Medicaid I can personally attest to the fact that the system provides solid preventive dental care to an astounding 41% of the children in my home state of Georgia.

Medicaid provides comprehensive health care for specified legal immigrants, such as certain legal guest workers. We also grant special visas to abused spouses with dependent children and refugees for obvious humanitarian reasons, allowing them to improve their status from illegal to legal, and thereby qualify for benefits.

We even provide emergency medical care for all illegal immigrants, regardless of status, and regardless of cost. My home state of Georgia reports $88 million a year currently spent providing free emergency room care to illegal immigrants.

We are a mighty generous nation, both to our own poor and to millions of immigrants and visitors from around the world, both legal and illegal.

But that isn't enough for far too many of the current flood of illegal immigrants swamping America's social safety net. These lawbreakers demand cradle-to-grave free comprehensive health care, gained through fraud, and paid for by American taxpayers.

They have been told by open-borders activists that it is their right to do so. These activists have carefully spread their propaganda that our laws to the contrary are "unfair", and it is therefore their right to ignore and undermine them. In many cases, you'll find these "activists" also running the clinics providing the fraudulent benefits to their personal financial gain.

In 46 states, they've been getting away with it. In those states, the only proof of eligibility required for comprehensive Medicaid benefits is the word of the person applying for the benefit. No paperwork, no documentation, no verification, nothing. Simply say you are a citizen of the United States, and that's enough.

Medicaid is a joint federal/state program. Each year there is a finite sum approved for care. Every year the Medicaid budgets of most states are exceeded, and low-income families are denied care or removed from the program entirely.

So for every illegal immigrant who fraudulently obtains a Medicaid benefit, a low-income American or legal immigrant is denied the same benefit to which they were legally entitled.

Last fall, my colleague U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal (R-GA) and I authored a provision to correct this gross fraud and injustice to both poor Americans and taxpayers in general. The provision was signed into law earlier this year as part of the Deficit Reduction Act.

The new law does not reduce anyone's legal benefits under Medicaid. It simply requires proof of eligibility the same proof of legal status you and I are required to present when obtaining a driver's license in most states.

Those currently receiving benefits are unaffected. Anyone in the future who applies or re-applies will have to show some proof of citizenship. A birth certificate or most state's driver's licenses are perfectly acceptable.

The Secretary of Health and Human Services may also approve additional documents to prove citizenship. Since the Social Security Administration is very good at verifying people who get benefits, the Secretary could say that for the elderly, a Medicare card could suffice.

Some have argued that there are Americans who cannot produce any proof of their identity or citizenship as an excuse to leave a giant loophole that allows Medicaid fraud. My own state Medicaid Director says that is not the case. For the very elderly or disabled, social workers are having no problems obtaining replacement, or first time birth certificates from their home counties.

Some argue that illegal immigrants deserve free comprehensive health care at taxpayer expense. This is also the same school that argues for open borders that anyone who wants to come to the U.S. should be allowed to with no questions asked.

Fine. Bring the new bills before Congress and let's have a vote. It would fail by overwhelming numbers. Among this crowd can also be found the clinics, businesses, and organizations that financially benefit from illegal immigration and the current Medicaid fraud.

That's the ugly truth behind this issue. There is a minority of Americans who profit off illegal immigration, at the expense of the majority of their fellow citizens and even the immigrants themselves.

But in this specific case, they enrich themselves at the expense of our own poor and sick. That's a crime that thanks to our new Medicaid citizenship requirement law, Americans will no longer tolerate.