CA Lawmakers Seek Audit of $9.5b Illegal Immigrant Health Care

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.”

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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.

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