Without officially abandoning their woke rhetoric, Illinois' very blue government has quietly abandoned their healthcare for all due to "budget concerns":

https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/illinois-moves-to-cut-thousands-of-non-citizens-from-taxpayer-subsidized-health-care-5611000

Illinois Moves to Cut Thousands of Non-Citizens From Taxpayer-Subsidized Health Care
Illinois is struggling to contain soaring costs for its program, which covers illegal immigrants.

By Zachary Stieber - March 20, 2024

Illinois officials are moving to stop providing taxpayer-subsidized health care to thousands of non-citizens, including many illegal immigrants, in a bid to rein in soaring costs.

The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services said in a recent statement it will start annually verifying the eligibility for two programs—Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA) and Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS)—after enrollment was paused due to budget concerns.

“This process will mirror the redetermination process used in the traditional Medicaid program to ensure those enrolled remain eligible,” the agency said.

The plans include closing cases for people who are enrolled who make over a certain amount or who otherwise are no longer eligible for the program in which they’re enrolled. Officials also plan on removing legal permanent residents who qualify for Medicaid, which is a federal program.

“The redetermination process ensures that those who are enrolled remain eligible for coverage,” Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services spokesperson Jamie Munks told WBEZ. “If an individual loses coverage through the redetermination process, it is because they no longer meet eligibility requirements, or they are required to respond or submit additional information to prove their continued eligibility, but they do not do so.”

The processes are estimated to reduce the number of enrollees in the state programs by about 6,000 people, state Sen. Don DeWitte, a Republican, told the Center Square after hearing from state health officials. Those removals would result in savings of $14 million.

HBIS, launched in 2020, provides taxpayer-funded health care for seniors who would receive Medicaid coverage but can’t get it due to their immigration status. HBIA, introduced in 2022, provides the same state benefits for people aged 42 to 64. Illegal immigrants are among the approximately 63,000 covered.

“Everyone, regardless of documentation status, deserves access to holistic healthcare coverage,” Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat, said in one of his statements in support of the programs.

Many Republicans have opposed the programs, noting that some citizens still lack health care.

The costs of the programs have increasingly sparked concern among lawmakers of both parties.

Each person aged 55 or older costs about $1,168 a month, while the rest cost about $750 a month, according to the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. Total monthly costs soared to $71 million in August 2023. Illinois paused enrollment in 2023 after projecting it would cost $831 million for fiscal year 2024 and spike to $1.1 billion if no restrictions were implemented. Lawmakers had only approved $550 million for the programs for the fiscal year.

Health officials said the growing costs stemmed in part from covered populations suffering from “untreated chronic conditions.”

Mr. Pritzker, in his recently submitted fiscal 2025 budget, asked for $629 million in funding for the program.

Fees Introduced

The Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services said in 2023, as it paused enrollment, that it would also be imposing co-pays for certain hospital services that were not eligible for federal money.

The new fees included $250 for an inpatient hospitalization, $100 for a visit to an emergency room, and 10 percent of what the department would pay providers for non-emergency outpatient services.

The agency said at the time that the changes would help bring down costs while describing the programs as “a vital resource for individuals who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid but for their immigration status.”

The agency later rolled back the emergency room visit co-pay, under pressure from activists.

The rollback came after officials said they checked with the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which conveyed that states can ask for reimbursement for all emergency room visits, regardless of the patient’s immigration status.

“This decision will keep Illinoisans safer and allow them to seek the healthcare they need in emergencies,” Tovia Siegel, director of the Healthy Illinois Campaign, an activist group, said in a statement.

The other co-pays were kept in place. The agency said they would help ensure costs came down. Ms. Siegel said they would be “a significant burden on both providers and patients, limiting access to healthcare for Illinois’ immigrant community.”

"Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people's money."

Margaret Thatcher interview on This Week, Thames TV, 5 February 1976

Our Governor has figured out how to stem Michigan's population decline and increase the drain on our healthcare system:

https://www.michigan.gov/ogm/services/newcomer-rental-subsidy

Michigan Office of Global Michigan

Newcomer Rental Subsidy

The Newcomer Rental Subsidy program provides Refugees and other Newcomer population-eligible households with rental assistance up to $500 per month for up to 12 months, with eligibility based on immigration status and household income.

Many refugees and other newcomers face critical housing challenges, and this program will increase access to better and more affordable housing opportunities while supporting a more rapid social integration to refugees and other newcomer populations to Michigan.

Eligibility and Immigration Status

A beneficiary must have an eligible immigration status as defined by the Office of Refugee Resettlement which includes:

Refugees
Asylees
Special Immigration Visa (SIV)
Victims of Human Trafficking
Cuban and Haitian entrants
Afghan Nationals, and
Ukrainian Humanitarian Parolees.

Other immigration statuses include individuals who arrived under the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan (CHNV) program; individuals who arrived under the Family Reunification Parole Process for El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Colombia, individuals with a pending asylum application, and other immigrant individuals on a case-by-case scenario.

Eligibility and Household Income

Applicants must be renting individuals or households who are experiencing housing instability; and:
Under 85% of the Federal Poverty Limit, or
Live in Qualified Census Tract area, or
Have an income at or below 60% of Area Median Income (AMI) and receive any of the following federal assistance:

Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Free and Reduced-Price Lunch (NSLP) and/or School Breakfast (SBP) programs, Medicare Part D Low-income Subsidies, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), Head Start and/or Early Head Start, Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women Infants, and Children (WIC), Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP), or Pell Grants.

Program Background

Office of Global Michigan, whose mission is to make Michigan welcoming and inclusive, in partnership with Michigan State Housing Development Authority launched the Newcomer Rental Subsidy program. The program is also supported in part, by federal award number SLFRP0127 awarded to the state of Michigan by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and in part by the Office of Global Michigan through allocation of federal Office of Refugee Resettlement awards.

Speaking of  "illegal aliens received medical care through a variety of taxpayer-funded means"

- sometimes it takes a California blogger who really knowns his government grants to expose the hidden ways our money pours out of DC. 

I give you Isaac Seliger's Grant-Writing blog post of May 15.

https://seliger.com/2024/05/15/the-new-nonprofit-migrant-industrial-complex-takes-advantage-of-the-us-border-crisis/

The new Nonprofit Migrant Industrial Complex takes advantage of the US border crisis

If I hopped into the Time Tunnel to go back 15 years or more, I’d find that Seliger + Associates was writing a fair number of proposals for nonprofits providing services to refugees and immigrants—the term migrants was not yet in vogue and, depending on the client, we’d still sometimes use “illegal alien” rather than the softer “undocumented person” now de rigueur in polite society (to quote an old English writer of some note from Romeo & Juliet, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”). Still, not only have we not written any grants for this target population* in at least 10 years, we don’t even get any calls for this project concept. Seems odd, since Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) says there were at least 3,200,000 migrant encounters nationwide in 2023, not counting the millions of gotta-ways, compared to just 314,000 in 2013.

With a 10-fold increase in only a decade, one would think S + A would be doing lots of proposals for migrant services, but this is not the case. We know why this conundrum exists, but what passes for the US media these days is incurious because the answer doesn’t match the preferred narrative of the moment. Then along comes a real investigative reporter, Madeleine Rowley, writing in Substack,  Nonprofits Are Making Billions off the Border Crisis: Federal funding has turned the business of resettling migrant children into a goldmine for a handful of NGOs—and their top executives. So, now the rest of you know.

Rowley writes:

Although the federally funded Unaccompanied Children Program is responsible for resettling unaccompanied migrant minors who enter the U.S., it delegates much of the task to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that run shelters in the border states of Texas, Arizona, and California. . . The Free Press examined three of the most prominent NGOs that have benefited: Global Refuge, Southwest Key Programs, and Endeavors, Inc. These organizations have seen their combined revenue grow from $597 million in 2019 to an astonishing $2 billion by 2022, the last year for which federal disclosure documents are available. And the CEOs of all three nonprofits reap more than $500,000 each in annual compensation, with one of them—the chief executive of Southwest Key—making more than $1 million. While some NGOs have long had operations at the border, “what is new under Biden is the amount of taxpayer money being awarded, the lack of accountability for performance, and the lack of interest in solving the problem,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that researches the effect of government immigration policies and describes its bias as “low-immigration, pro-immigrant.”

Rowley focuses on one aspect of migrant funding, the Unaccompanied Children Program, but the same crazy funding for various other migrant services exists across the migrant grant spectrum; this has been the case at various funding levels since the Obama administration. Going back into the Time Tunnel to, say, 2010, most funding for migrant services originated in DHHS Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). While ORR still has some small competitive, discretionary grant programs, the big grant money, and the grants that Rowley writes about, does not seem to originate in ORR discretionary grant programs—I’ve never seen any of these RFPs at grants.gov. I’m pretty sure these are essentially no-bid contracts, and if RFPs are issued they must be being published in an alternate fed portal than grants.gov and be wired for particular nonprofits.

A truism of the US grant making process, which I learned decades ago, is that most grant programs are simply the federal government offloading something congress and/or the administration wants done but doesn’t want the government to do directly. In other words, the feds are “hiring” nonprofits via discretionary grant programs. While nonprofits traditionally were funded by donations and memberships, not government grants, this began to change in the 1930s during the New Deal and took off in 1965 with the blizzard of President Johnson’s War on Poverty programs. It didn’t take very long for nimble nonprofits to realize that money could be made by tailoring the agency’s programming to incorporate whatever the government wants to fund. This is in line with the following analogy we often use when a nonprofit CEO calls about grant seeking in general. We’ve all seen the pictures of bears in Alaska fishing for salmon. A bear that only bites coho salmon is going to be a lot skinnier when hybernation time comes than a bear that bites pink, king, coho, etc., salmon. The same is true for nonprofits seeking grants: it pays to bite any more or less appropriate grant-salmon than to wait for the perfect grant-salmon to swim by.

At the same time that nonprofits discovered the emerging grant gravy train, politicians and bureaucrats realized that grants could be used as a form of patronage like the old days of Tammany Hall in NYC and Boss Pendergast in Kansas City. Instead of rigged construction contracts with “no show” jobs, as depicted in The Sopranos, the same result could be achieved via grants, particularly at the city/county level. Even better, cloaking the potential corruption with the saintly aura of nonprofit charities as the “cutout” provides a lot of political cover. Clearly, a match made in heaven, or as The Band put it in Up On Cripple Creek: “A drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.”

The combo of the COVID-19 epidemic, border/migrant crisis, and climate change Green New Deal has created an unprecedented tsunami of federal funding starting in 2020. Since these were pitched as EXISTENTIAL CRISES (all CAPS intentional) with the media fanning the flames of hysteria, congress passed huge multi-trillion-dollar funding bills and the bureaucrats started shoveling grants out the door with little, if any, oversight. Hence, the boondoggle that Rowley writes about. But the corruption and rot is likely much deeper than the three bloated nonprofits she cites.

*For years, the phrase “target population” was standard in RFPs and grant writing. Somehow, the word “target” has become pejorative, and we now often see this phrase in RFPs instead: “population of focus.”