“Expanding Illinois’ Medicaid program under the federal health-care reform law will cost the state $1.3 billion a year in 2020 and beyond, according to an analysis.
Expanding Illinois’ Medicaid program under the federal health-care reform law will cost the state $1.3 billion a year in 2020 and beyond, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Rand Corp.
The annual cost is at least six times higher than what state officials have estimated since the federal Affordable Care Act became law in March 2010.
Until now, officials at Gov. Pat Quinn’s Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services have said the expansion of eligibility standards for the public insurance program, scheduled to take effect in 2014, would be financed almost entirely by the federal government.
HFS officials had said the expansion would cost Illinois almost nothing initially, and only about $200 million per year in 2020 and beyond.
But the study by Rand, a respected not-for-profit research institute based in California, indicates that Illinois will incur about $700 million in new Medicaid costs not covered by the federal government in 2016. The cost to Illinois taxpayers would ramp up to $1.3 billion annually by 2020 and total $6.2 billion between now and 2020.
The nonpartisan Council of State Governments commissioned the Rand study — which analyzed Medicaid expansion costs for Illinois, California, Texas, Connecticut and Montana — to provide more perspective than what had been available through the Congressional Budget Office, according to Chris Whatley, director of the council’s office in Washington, D.C.”