Illinois House to debate bill giving noncitizens Medicaid benefits
Posted by Riverbender on May 24, 2020, 9:32 pm
Nothing like giving money to the illegals when we dont even have a balanced budget and with the Democrat super majority...
(The Center Square) – A rushed budget implementation bill for the coming fiscal year up for debate in the House on Friday would enable the transfer of federal COVID-19 relief funds for local governments and expand Medicaid to people who are not U.S. citizens.
An amendment to Senate Bill 1805 that surfaced Friday shows the measure expands Medicaid coverage to people who aren't U.S. citizens who would be eligible for the benefit if it weren’t for immigration status. A legislative analysis did not say how much that would cost taxpayers.
House Floor Amendment 2 to Senate Bill 1805 says “the Department of Healthcare and Family Services may provide medical assistance … to noncitizens over the age of 65 years of age who are not eligible for medical assistance … due to their not meeting the otherwise applicable provisions … whose income is at or below 100 percent of the federal poverty level.”
There also wasn’t a cost analysis for the increased thresholds of energy and heating assistance. The measure qualifies households earning no more than 200 percent of the federal poverty line to get Emergency Assistance Program benefits. That’s up from 150 percent of the federal poverty line. The threshold to qualify for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program would also be increased from 150 to 200 percent.
The Budget Implementation Bill, or BIMP, also creates several funds to deal with federal aid during the COVID-19 crisis. A recent report said Illinois is withholding $4.9 billion in federal CARES Act funding from local governments, especially in rural areas. Gov. J.B. Pritzker said there needed to be enabling legislation to direct those funds.
The BIMP creates the State Coronavirus Urgent Remediation Emergency, or CURE Fund and the Local CARE Fund to facilitate those funds.
It also says the funding to local governments would be proportional to their population. The five counties that got federal CARES funding directly would be ineligible.
Local governments could use the money for any expenses incurred because of COVID-19 that weren’t included in budgets approved for local government annual budgets and any COVID-related expenditure for the rest of the calendar year.
The BIMP also would create the Coronavirus Business Interruption Grant, or BIG Program, a pandemic-related stability payment for healthcare providers.
as if taxes are not high enough already the Democrats find new ways to spend even more of your money.
Illinois to become 1st state to provide Medicaid regardless of immigration status
Illinois will become the first state to provide Medicaid for undocumented seniors not only because of what state Rep. Delia Ramirez has heard from her constituents, but because of her own family’s experience.
Tucked in near the end of the 465-page budget implementation bill that passed the Illinois General Assembly late Saturday night was a provision giving Medicaid access to noncitizens over 65 years old and whose income is $12,670 or less, which is at or under the federal poverty level.
Gov. JB Pritzker said he will approve next year’s budget and its implementations. Medicaid services for qualified undocumented seniors will kick in July 1 when the 2021 budget year begins.
The expansion was a big win for the Legislative Latino Caucus, which Ramirez took lead on the effort through the health and human services working group leading up to the special session. She said the coverage will save the state money in the long run, costing about $2 million, which in her opinion, “is nothing to a $2 billion Medicaid bill.”
She said it’s about three times cheaper to cover undocumented seniors than it is to not cover them and then “have them in a hospital when they’re already dying and are in stage three of cancer and other things because they didn’t show up until they tested positive with coronavirus and then all these other things they had also came to light and became too late to prevent.”
One of the leading motivators for Ramirez was her mother, who is now a U.S. citizen. She was a homecare worker with diabetes who stopped working on March 24 because she and the 89-year-old person she was taking care of decided it’d be safer for her to stop visiting amid the pandemic.
When the Chicago Democrat asked her mother why she stopped paying for insurance after joining unemployment, her mother explained that they simply couldn’t afford it. Ramirez’s father retired without pension benefits and brings in just enough money to cover his medications and all other bills.
″‘I can’t pay out of pocket $500 a month (for insurance),’” Ramirez said what her mother told her. ”‘So until I go back to work, I have no insurance and I’m going to pray that I stay as healthy as possible and not go anywhere, so that I’m not in a position where I have to end up in a hospital with a bill we can’t afford.’”
Ramirez had a similar bill last year that failed to reach a vote on the House floor, but she said the COVID-19 pandemic has shined a light on the need for expanded health care coverage.
She represents one of the hardest-hit districts from the pandemic, which primarily includes the Humboldt Park neighborhood in Chicago. The positivity rate for the virus in Ramirez’s district reached nearly 50%, she said. The COVID-19 death rate in Illinois for Latinos is about 19% while Latinos make up about 17% of the state’s population, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health and U.S. Census Bureau 2019 estimates.
Additionally, she noted that about 250,000 families in the state didn’t receive an economic stimulus check because they were either mixed status families or undocumented.
“You could imagine the financial hardship,” Ramirez said. “No access to health care, no access to unemployment insurance, living in multi-generational homes, no place to isolate. All of this equates to a higher risk of people not just testing positive, but literally dying.”
She said there was some opposition to her bill last year from lawmakers saying “we should only be focusing on citizens,” or asking how the state will pay for it. But during this year’s special session, she didn’t hear any opposition.
“Just this piece right here for a group of people who have been told that no resources — you can pay taxes, you can do this, you can do that, you can be in this country for 25 years attempting to legalize, but you can’t get this basic health care, basic ability to stay alive, covered. If ever before, this pandemic has shown us how critical that is,” Ramirez said.
She also highlighted health care as a human right, undocumented or not, and that COVID-19 “has shown the way public health binds us all together and that denying health care to someone is hurting all of us.”
ASI Home Care is one company that will benefit from the measure. Although based in Chicago, patients can be from anywhere in the state as ASI Home Care offers a variety of telehealth and remote monitoring services.