Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), a 2028 presidential hopeful, is doing an about-face by excluding older illegals from a budget-busting healthcare program he signed into law just three years ago.
After enjoying their plans for only three years, thousands of illegal migrants now stand to lose their state-funded health care to budget cuts in Illinois as Gov. Pritzker seeks to balance a huge budget deficit.
Pritzker and state Democrats earned national coverage in 2022 by creating a healthcare plan that covered illegal migrants from the ages of 42 to 64 and up, along with those under 18. But now, Pritzker is seeking to cut the plans of the 42 to 64 age group, leaving out of taxpayer-subsidized coverage the thousands of migrants who only recently gained their insurance plans.
The Democrat governor, who has dreams of running for the Democrat Party nomination for president in 2028, is still claiming that “Illinois is doing all we can to preserve healthcare coverage,” but now seems to realize that there has to be a breaking point somewhere in a state that has a $3.2 billion deficit. And last June, he already pressed the pause button on the second leg of that coverage. Now, he wants to formally end the program.
“We need to make sure we are living within our fiscal limits in the state of Illinois. That is something that wasn’t done for a lot of years,” the ambitious governor said when he paused the program.
Pritzker is attempting to take a different path than fellow Democrat — and another who wants to be president — Gavin Newsom, who as governor of California has been reduced to borrowing $3.44 billion dollars because his state’s Medicaid health care for illegals is leading to the further bankrupting of the state.
The program itself has certainly been a budget buster. A recent audit found that the health care for illegals policy has cost the state an incredible $1.6 billion since 2020 when the first leg, covering migrants older than 65, was enacted.
Indeed, in 2022 when he was celebrating his decision to sign the 42 to 64 healthcare coverage into law, Pritzker extravagantly exclaimed that “everyone, regardless of documentation status, deserves access to holistic health care coverage.” But that promise seems to have had only a three-year lifespan as his new cuts are proposed.
There has been some pushback. A growing list of state Democrats and advocates for illegals are alarmed by the budget cuts, according to the Chicago Tribune. Andrea Kovach, a senior attorney at the Shriver Center on Poverty Law and a member of the Healthy Illinois Campaign, for instance, insisted that illnesses don’t go away just because someone is illegally in this country.
She added, “People still age, have accidents and need to treat and manage chronic conditions. The difference is they’ll not be diagnosed soon, but at a much later stage and it will be much more costly to the state,” adding that Illinois has “a legacy we should be really proud of, and now is not the time to go backward.”
According to data from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, close to 700,000 illegal aliens live in the sanctuary state of Illinois.
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