Surprise! Pritzker’s $1.6B Health Care for Non-Citizens Flunks Audit

That’s $1.6 billion in taxpayer money, of course. Not J.B. Pritzker’s money. And this comes from program auditors via the Chicago Tribune, not Elon Musk or DOGE.

It sounds as though Illinois could use a DOGE team or three, though:

Gov. JB Pritzker’s administration vastly underestimated the cost and popularity of a pair of health insurance programs for immigrants who are not citizens that has ended up costing the state $1.6 billion since the initiative began in 2020, according to an audit report released Wednesday.

Aside from inaccurate projections of the programs’ cost and the number of people who would enroll, the audit uncovered more than 6,000 people enrolled in the programs who were listed as “undocumented” despite having Social Security numbers, and nearly 700 who were enrolled in the program for people 65 and older despite being younger than that. In addition, almost 400 people were enrolled in the programs but appeared to have been in the country long enough to qualify for Medicaid, which is jointly funded by the federal government.

First question: why did it take five years to do an audit? Bear in mind that the original program was aimed only at senior-age immigrants who couldn’t qualify for Medicaid based on federal rules for eligibility. That made at least some sense as long as costs could be controlled, especially in the context of the pandemic in 2020. Several states considered emergency expansion of health-care benefits to help keep the pandemic under control among the most at-risk population.

However, as the Trib notes, Pritzker expanded the program twice since then to include more immigrant non-citizens. Instead of just covering senior-age immigrants during an emergency, it now uses taxpayer funds to cover health costs from people as young as 42 years of age. Why would they need such benefits rather than do what taxpayers do — work and pay for their coverage on their own.

Plus, the pandemic has been over for at least three years, and arguably four. Shouldn’t Pritzker’s administration have been auditing this program all along? And failing that, why did they not audit the program before expanding it? Twice?

And it’s not as if the program ran without sending up any red flags during that time, either:

This state-run health care initiative has been expanded twice and now covers those 42 and older. The ballooning costs iof the program complicated budget negotiations two years ago. …

But the costs for the programs eventually spiraled upward and the issue has roiled the General Assembly in recent years. In February 2023, Pritzker took steps to curtail enrollment in the programs after his administration an initial cost estimate from his administration of $220 million swelled fivefold three months later to $1.1 billion. Ultimately, a little over $500 million was set aside in the budget that passed by the legislature that spring.

So the Illinois legislature knew that costs for this program had ballooned far beyond expectations, and … no one in leadership thought to ask why. These weren’t normal program cost overruns; this welfare expansion cost five times what Pritzker had projected while creating the program. And it still took nearly two years before Pritzker’s administration bothered to audit the program and determine that taxpayers were getting soaked.

This goes beyond incompetence. It qualifies for dereliction of duty. In a state with a competitive political environment, it would cost politicians their jobs. That won’t happen in Illinois, where Democrats have a stranglehold on state government. It does make an even better argument for the several Illinois counties that are proposing a relocation to Indiana, though.