(The Center Square) – Several federal and state lawmakers are trying to get Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults funding restored in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s budget.
The governor did not include HBIA funding in his budget proposal earlier this year. Combined HBIA and Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS) spending in fiscal year 2024 was $682 million. Since inception, the total HBIS and HBIA program has cost Illinois taxpayers more than $1.6 billion.
Pritzker included $132 million in HBIS funding in his existing spending plan. HBIA medical coverage is scheduled to end June 30.
Illinois U.S. Representatives Chuy Garcia and Delia Ramirez joined state Sen. Graciela Guzmán, D-Chicago, and state Rep. Theresa Mah, D-Chicago, at a virtual press conference hosted by the Healthy Illinois campaign on Friday.
Garcia said it is unacceptable that citizenship status matters for healthcare benefits but not for paying into government programs.
“Immigrants pay over $580 billion in federal, state and local taxes towards programs they can’t even benefit from,” Garcia said.
Guzmán said legislators have been in deep conversations with Pritzker’s office and the Department of Healthcare and Family Service about HBIA funding.
“That being said, speaking for me individually, this is a dealbreaker. We’re talking about 32,000 lives in peril,” Guzmán said.
At a Joint Committee on Administrative Rules meeting last month, state Rep. Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, questioned why the Pritzker administration was “taking a victory lap” for helping immigrants while simultaneously filing emergency rules to kill the HBIA program.
State Rep. Steven Reick, R-Woodstock, said the Pritzker administration abused its emergency rule-making authority.
“Had there been some consideration of the escalating cost of this program and some way in which we could have made a rule-making that could accommodate the kind of concerns which Rep. Tarver has just brought up instead of a meat-axe approach to cutting it completely, based upon, again, an emergency rule, this was, I think an abuse of the rule-making authority at the outset of this process,” Reick said.
###
