* I’ve been shaking my head at a story published the other day entitled “Gov. Rauner threatens to halt health insurance payments to providers for state workers”…

As Illinois approaches its 11th week without a state budget, Gov. Bruce Rauner has threatened to take the unprecedented step of stopping all payments to doctors, hospitals and others providing health care to the almost 363,000 state workers, university employees, retirees and others covered by the state’s group insurance plan.

“All health care services will continue to be paid as long as possible,” said Meredith Krantz, spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services.

“However, in the near future, we will no longer have the legal authority to continue to pay health care vendors for their services,” she wrote in an email Friday to The State Journal-Register. […]

“The state has never said, ‘We’re not playing claims,’ before,” said Anders Lindall, spokesman for Chicago-based Council 31 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

Lindall called the new information from the state “very disturbing.”

The governor isn’t “threatening” to do anything. Gov. Rauner vetoed the health insurance payment appropriations bill weeks and weeks ago, so the state simply has no legal appropriations authority to pay providers.

I’ve explained this several times before. Click here for an August 4th post which shows what Fiscal Year 2016 payments were and weren’t being made at the time.

The state was so far behind on its Fiscal Year 2015 group insurance payments that it is apparently only now catching up. Once all those payments are made, there’s nothing anybody can do unless a new bill is passed and then signed into law or a court orders action.

* And, even then, where’s the money gonna come from? Just because there’s an appropriation or a judicial decree doesn’t mean the state has any available tax revenues to make those payments. As I wrote in this week’s syndicated newspaper column…

It’s kinda like thinking you have money in your bank account because you still have plenty of checks.

So, now what? Well, a federal judge might be our only hope. Click here for my Crain’s Chicago Business column.