* Gov. Bruce Rauner deliberately slow-walked this process, but the Pritzker administration is in charge now…

As of March 15, more than 112,000 Illinois Medicaid applications remained unprocessed beyond the 45-day limit the federal government puts on those eligibility determinations.

The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services has warned state officials that Illinois is out of compliance with regulations on timely determinations of eligibility for the federally funded program to provide health coverage for low-income people and asked how they plan to fix that, records show.

If a case is delayed past the federal time limit, Illinois Medicaid applicants are supposed to be able to get cards granting them temporary medical benefits. But those also are backlogged. The state’s Medicaid application-processing delays and failure to issue temporary medical benefits have left some of Illinois’ poorest residents without access to health care, in some cases for more than a year.

Illinois provided no temporary medical benefits at all between June 2016 and September 2017, state Department of Human Services records filed in federal court show. […]

Charlotte Brown, who works for Christopher Rural Health in southern Illinois, said most Medicaid applications in her part of the state are processed within two weeks but that it often takes months to get newborns added to their mothers’ Medicaid cases.

That’s just ridiculous. How would a newborn not qualify if their moms already did?

* Promises…

Jordan Abudayyeh, a spokeswoman for Gov. J.B. Pritzker, said: “It is unacceptable that people across the state are waiting for healthcare coverage, and he has directed the administration to take immediate steps to address this problem from the previous administration.”

In a written statement, the heads of the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services and the Department of Human Services said: “Our departments are working together closely to bring on more workers to process applications and redeterminations, as well as training and technical experts to support front-line staff.”

*** UPDATE *** From Meghan Powers at the Illinois Department of Human Services…

We’ve made a lot of progress in the last two months and newborns are now being added to their mothers’ cases in a timely manner. We have eliminated the backlog of more than 26,500 newborn applications.