(The Center Square) – California legislators are demanding an audit of the taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal program for its cost overruns relating to its $9.5 billion spent this year on illegal immigrant health care and the resulting impact on citizens’ Medi-Cal care.
Legislators say the governor’s administration has admitted that half of the state’s near doubling of Medi-Cal spending is from providing health care to illegal immigrants.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested a $6.2 billion bailout of the program, which recently experienced significant expansions in eligibility and costs of care. On the eligibility side, the state now allows those with qualifying incomes to apply regardless of immigration status, or held assets, meaning illegal immigrants and those with possibly millions of dollars in assets but little in income, to secure taxpayer-funded health care.
“Over the past six years, General Fund spending on Medi-Cal has nearly doubled to $42.1 billion, and total spending on Medi-Cal has grown by 84.2 percent totaling to $188.1 billion,” wrote Assemblyman Carl DeMaio, R-San Diego, in an audit request letter signed by nine of the Republican members of the Assembly. “The Governor’s Administration admits that nearly one half of the growth in General Fund Medi-Cal spending results from California’s expansion of full-scope Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants.”
The audit requests include an examination into the program’s cost overruns, cost of illegal immigrant care, impact of illegal immigrant care on citizens’ access to care, and whether the state has illegally requested or been reimbursed for by the federal government for illegal immigrant care.
Republican leaders emphasized that the brunt of the impact from the program expansion is existing beneficiaries, who often struggle to find care.
“Democrats’ bad accounting has brought Medi-Cal to the breaking point, making it harder for patients to get in to see a doctor,” said Assembly Minority Leader James Gallagher, R-East Nicolaus. “We owe it to Californians — and to the vulnerable people who depend on this program — to make sure Medi-Cal is meeting their needs.”
Amid slow wage growth, so many Californians are now low-income that the plurality of state residents are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the increasingly overburdened taxpayer-funded public healthcare system.
Medi-Cal was allocated funding this year to cover 14.5 million Californians, but with a recent eligibility expansion to all income-qualified illegal immigrants and the elimination of assets in means-testing, surging enrollment has bankrupted the program.
In 2012, 7.6 million, or 20% of Californians, were enrolled in Medi-Cal, doubling to 14.9 million, or 38.2% of Californians, by April 2024.
As a result, Gov. Gavin Newsom has requested a $6.4 billion emergency Medi-Cal bailout, which will also help cover $9.5 billion allocated this year for illegal immigrant coverage.
Health care experts say many patients on Medi-Cal struggle to find doctors, especially as low reimbursement rates discourage more physicians from accepting Medi-Cal patients.
“Many on Medi-Cal are already having a hard time finding doctors to treat them because of low reimbursement rates these doctors receive from the government,” said Sally Pipes, president and Thomas W. Smith Fellow in health care policy at the Pacific Research Center, to The Center Square.
Health care providers are also struggling under the new $25 per hour health care minimum wage law, which the governor sought to delay last year due to the wage’s significant impact on the state budget. With the governor seeking to make a $7 billion withdrawal from reserves and federal funding for many state programs now uncertain, cuts or delays to program expansions may again be on the table.
