Starting on July 1, the state government of Illinois will no longer offer health care to illegal immigrants between the ages of 42 and 65.
The Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) program, which currently serves eligible individuals aged 42 to 64, will be ending effective July 1, 2025…. The Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS) program, which serves qualifying individuals aged 65 and over, will not be changing. Due to State Fiscal Year 2026 budgetary constraints, the state had to make the difficult decision to use the limited funding available to continue coverage for eligible noncitizens aged 65+ only.
Earlier this year, the state auditor found that governor JB Pritzker’s administration “dramatically underestimated the actual price tag of a controversial health care program for adult immigrants who lack legal status, costing the state $1.6 billion since 2020.” The state auditor found the initial cost estimates for the program for seniors was estimated at $224 million for 2021, 2022 and 2023 — but actually cost the state $412.3 million or 84 percent more. For the program for adults ages 55 to 64, initial estimates for those years ran $58.4 million, but actually cost the state $223 million, or 282 percent more. For the program for those aged 42-54, the cost estimate was $68 million but ultimately cost the state $262 million, or 3.8 times more than expected.
Over at Semafor, Dave Weigel reports that while Pritzker is giving up on part of the program for now because of the cost, he still believes that having the state cover the costs of health care for illegal immigrants is a good idea.
It was a bitter pill for Gov. JB Pritzker, who told Semafor on a recent trip to DC that “if I could afford to do it, I would have a basic level of health care for undocumented people.”
“We have undocumented people who’ve been in the state for 10, 20, 30 years, and they’re paying taxes, holding down jobs, good neighbors, no criminal record,” Pritzker told Semafor. “In fact, they’ve been good, law-abiding residents of the state. And when they get sick, it costs all of us money. So if we can prevent them from getting sick, that’s better.”
Considering Pritzker’s not-so-hidden presidential ambitions — the subject of a profile I wrote in the most recent issue of the print magazine — some Republicans may think it is insane for a Democratic governor to run around arguing the government should be paying for the health care of illegal immigrants.
But before you can win a general election, you have to win a presidential primary that is likely to be fiercely competitive. It’s easy to envision Pritzker running on a platform that keeps the progressive wish-list intact, and argues that what was primarily wrong with Democrats in 2024 was the messengers, not the message. In other words, he would contend there’s nothing all that unpopular or wrong about the progressive agenda circa 2024, it’s just that Joe Biden was really old, Kamala Harris just didn’t have enough time, and Tim Walz just didn’t appeal to men the way Democrats believed he would. But some other progressive politician — one with an extra billion dollars or two to spend on a campaign – can carry the day against JD Vance or some other GOP presidential nominee.
That analysis might seem completely wrongheaded to you and me, or even asinine. But I’ll bet there are a lot of Democratic primary voters who will like hearing that their agenda is really popular, and they don’t need to trim the sails of their ambitions or expectations of what the next Democratic president can do.