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* The governor’s mismanagement, ineptness and AWOL status is combining with the already horrid fiscal mess to produce some extremely painful problems…
A perfect storm of revenue problems is causing the Regional Transportation Authority to borrow up to $200 million so it can continue to fund the CTA, Pace and Metra. The cash shortfall comes from a variety of economic challenges, including the fact the state government is behind on payments and delays in getting receipts from sales taxes, officials said
* Meanwhile, the governor’s signature health care program, All Kids, may be just a paper tiger…
Is Illinois’ All Kids program falling short of its promise?
It appears so, according to a new report from health-care advocacy group Families USA finding that as many as 294,000 children in the state remain uninsured. […]
A state official said Thursday that about 270,000 children have enrolled in All Kids since it began 21/2 years ago. (When the program was first announced, in November 2005, officials estimated that about 250,000 Illinois children didn’t have health insurance.)
Why, then, does the Families USA report—which draws on data in the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey from 2005 to 2007—indicate that hundreds of thousands of children in the state remain without medical coverage?
I put the question to Illinois Medicaid Director Theresa Eagleson on Wednesday but didn’t receive a satisfactory answer.
One reason I suspect why the uninsured numbers haven’t budged much is that thousands of kids were shuffled from other state programs to All Kids to artificially inflate the enrollment numbers.
* And this is so typical…
When the University of Illinois won a $208 million federal grant to build the nation’s fastest supercomputer, Gov. Blagojevich said the state would kick in money for a building to house it.
But 17 months later, the school is wondering if it will ever see the money. […]
In 2007, the National Science Foundation was authorized to grant the university $208 million to build the computer in Urbana. Blagojevich pledged $60 million for a building. The university floated bonds and started construction in the fall, expecting that the state would pay the money back.
But sparring over a capital budget, the governor’s impeachment hearings and an uncertain budget picture in Springfield have left officials unsure whether they will be left holding the bag.
Blagojevich made too many empty and broken promises to ever fully document them.
* Related…
* Change for the better in Senate — we hope
* What is she thinking? Topinka is outraged
* Ex-Blagojevich chief of staff may cooperate with feds
* Prosecutors defend Patrick Fitzgerald’s comments on Rod Blagojevich
* Attorneys Defend Actions of Patrick Fitzgerald
* The Plainfield connection to governor’s downfall
* Sisterly love
* Governor’s sister-in-law should’ve voted present
* Beverly group records Blago rap
* Reports: Hastert noted in Blago complaint
posted by Rich Miller
Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:18 am
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Previous Post: More on that corruption poll
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Speaking of the U of I, they voted for a new chairman yesterday who has COUNTLESS state contracts that bear investigative reporting.
Comment by 4 percent Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:27 am
Oh, just give it up.
Quit blaming it all on Blago.
Everyone is having problems.
Look at California. Arnold says it is within weeks of going bankrupt.
Why not talk about the real problem.
The government has promissed too much and is paying too much in salaries and pensions.
The promisses were made to buy votes.
The only way to get everything under control is to actually reduce expenses across the board.
Even Obama is talking about social security and medicare reform.
Translation: Probably increase retirement age and make more income subject to withholding taxes.
Comment by True Observer Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:29 am
youre right Rich. “Too many empty and broken promises”…the first being his oath of office….
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:33 am
To promise help and not deliver it is, in my opinion, far worse than to just refuse the help outright.
That is what Blago has done with respect to All Kids — basically, promised that the state will help pay family medical bills and then reneged on that promise to the point that hardly any doctors will accept All Kids patients.
I suspect another reason uninsured numbers haven’t budged is because word has gotten out that the state doesn’t pay for All Kids and most doctors won’t accept All Kids patients.
Comment by Bookworm Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:44 am
TO, you’ve contradicted yourself or made the case against Blago in your diatribe.
-Blago has refused to consider any sort of a tax hike, save his ridiculous GRT.
-No one is blaming Blago entirely, although as the cheif executive of the state, he is the most responsible.
-The broken promises you consistently refer to were usually made by Blago.
-Blago didn’t reform much of anything, at least not in the sense of how you and I define it, but here’s to hoping his can be a cautionary tale for future governors and legislators.
Comment by The Doc Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:48 am
For fifteen years our state leaders knew we had a deficit that would eat every dollar we generate, yet they continued to kick the can down the road.
The day of reckoning is at hand and now is the time to be forced to address how this state spends more than it takes in. Raising taxes will not do anything more than delay this day and kick that deficit can down the road further. Raising taxes will put a burden on a state work force that has been feeling a decline in wages and benefits for years. Raising taxes is blatantly unfair when we are fully aware that the money raised will not fix our problems.
Even doubling our income tax will not raise $5 billion. But doubling our income tax will rob Illinoians at a crucial time in their lives when being faced with economic uncertainty. Voters have had enough!
The answer is to cut the budget, pass legislation to end the budget loopholes that have allowed this cursed budget situation upon our state, and eliminate the waste within our state government.
Want to save $3 billion immediately? Kill the Illinois Health Facilities Planning Board. Not only would you save billions, you would end a legacy of one of our most corrupt governmental bodies in history. We know how it has recently made news. It wasn’t by spending it’s billions efficiently, was it? We don’t need this embarrassment of an agency. Cut it! By simply dropping this corrupted agency, we will save Illinois taxpayers the shame of paying an additional 2% higher income tax!
There is enough waste in Illinois to cut back, balance our budget, and fix our real structural deficit, before we ever need to raise another dime in new taxes.
No tax increase until our problems are addressed using the billions currently taken from our pay checks already.
Comment by VanillaMan Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:49 am
One more thing…
Let’s recognize that Rod Blagojevich not only raised millions for his campaign, he used our tax money to shore up his Oval Office dreams. His promises and his budgets, his lawsuits, drug gimmicks, and everything that man did since 2002 was to look good to a national press and electorate.
He knew he was selling us down the river, but he expected to have jumped from the boat he deliberately sunk before it went over the waterfalls. He didn’t make it, and now we are the ones going down.
Blagojevich’s legacy is also one of a disgustingly ambitious man willing to do and say whatever it took to become a president. He threw dozens of supporters under the bus, backstabbed nearly every legislator in Illinois, shortchanged nearly every statewide leader, just to look good for a presidential run.
This is also a part of this man’s legacy we must never forget.
Comment by VanillaMan Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:55 am
Excellent roundup on the chronic theme of this administration: splashy promises, then either inept or nonexistent follow through.
The Tribune story in particular resonates. Let’s do a little Harper’s Index on the numbers:
250,000 — number of uninsured children in the state in 2005 when All-Kids was implemented
270,000 — number of children enrolled in All Kids since then
294,000 — number of uninsured children in the state today
I never was very good at math. I must have missed that population boom the last couple of years.
Comment by wordslinger Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:55 am
Rod doesn’t understand in general what a great resource UIUC is…not news to me…
Comment by Anonymous45 Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:56 am
TO: The problem with pensions for the state and local governments is that they are protected by the Illinois Constitution (Article XIII, Section 5) and cannot be diminished without a constitutional amendment to allow it. The full impact of the Wall Street crisis will hit state and local budgets later this year when they have to figure out how to pay for contributions due in 2010 (after their funds lost on average 30% of their value in 2008 not count additional losses in 2009). For many local governments, the required contribution will increase by 50% over what they cannot afford now. Either your local property tax bill will skyrocket, significant services will be cut or some towns will be driven to bankruptcy and require a state bailout. As for the state, we’ll find ourselves in a much deeper hole that will be approaching a liquidity problem for some funds. This will become the biggest fiscal crisis our governments will have ever faced and there are no easy answers.
Comment by Bluefish Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:58 am
“One reason I suspect why the uninsured numbers haven’t budged much is that thousands of kids were shuffled from other state programs to All Kids to artificially inflate the enrollment numbers”
Rich, everytime you say this, I have to laugh. Hopefully, this makes it easier to understand:
The state’s All Kids program is like a layer cake. It incorporated all children’s healthcare programs under one umbrella.
The lowest layer is medicaid-funded. The middle layer is SCHIP funded. The top layer is all state-funded and premium-funded.
The top layer is what the All Kids bill created. But the whole cake is now called All Kids. If your family makes absolutely nothing, you can be on all kids and pay nothing. If your family is rich, you can be on All Kids and pay a monthly premium.
All children’s healthcare programs are now just one program - All Kids. There wasn’t any switching people between programs. It is all one program.
And per the data from HFS, there are now over 1.4 million children under that umbrella (medicaid-funded, SCHIP funded, and State and premium-funded).
When the All Kids bill passed,there were about 1.15 million in the medicaid and SCHIP funded Kidcare program. So, the growth that Ms. Eagleson says is absolutely right. About half of the new enrollees have come in the expansion group, and the other half were previously eligible for state healthcare but not enrolled. That’s what they said when they passed the bill - that half of the uninsured were eligible but not enrolled.
Now do you understand? Hope that was helpful.
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 9:59 am
===That’s what they said when they passed the bill - that half of the uninsured were eligible but not enrolled.===
And, apparently, they’re still not enrolled.
Comment by Rich Miller Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:00 am
I would question whether the census stuff is up to date. If they did 2005 - 2007 Current Population Survey data, it is very well possible that really encompasses 2.5 years out of 3 years (through end of 2006) where the program didn’t even exist.
I will freely admit that it is possible that more people became uninsured in the past few years than the State could enroll. Its possible.
But you can’t deny the fact that children’s healthcare has grown by that 250,000+ since the law went into affect. And those people had to be uninsured for 1 year in order to enroll.
I will look at the study and let you know. At least let me know if you understand that they can’t pad the numbers by switching people from other programs. It is all one program now.
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:08 am
VM, I might be missing something here, but can you explain how getting rid of HFPB is all by itself going to save the state $3 BILLION? I agree it’s about as useless and corrupt a state agency as there is and should be gotten rid of, but does it really spend THAT much?
Comment by Bookworm Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:14 am
Wanna bet that many of the new enrollees were not uninsured before, they were just insured under policies that cost their parents more than All Kids?
Comment by Anon Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:15 am
Frankly, Anon, I can’t imagine why anyone would willingly give up private insurance for All Kids unless they were really, really desperate.
My daughter was on Medicaid/All Kids for two years after I lost a job with good health insurance. I could not wait to get her off of it, because finding a decent doctor for her was impossible. Yes, it was better than nothing, but that’s about the best I can say for it. When I was finally able to get decent HMO coverage for her, I was so relieved.
Comment by Bookworm Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:28 am
Rich, I just looked.
To get their data, the study averaged the Current Population Survey from 2005, 2006, and 2007.
Current Population Survey data
2005 Illinois kids uninsured: 329,000
2006 Illinois kids uninsured: 302,000
2007 Illinois kids uninsured: 210,000
It looks like there has been a dramatic drop-off if you look year-by-year.
But the reports also talk about how some people who have a “medical card” still think they are uninsured.
Comment by Anonymous Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:32 am
insurance is not insurance if health care providers do not accept the program due to non payment for services rendered…this happens everyday in the health care marketplace with All Kids and ither State issued insurance programs…they assure nothing…
Comment by Anonymous45 Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 10:41 am
The reason that the FAmiliesUSA report shows such high numbers of uninsured is because they used data that every health policy person knows is hugely flawed - Current Population Survey. CPS data is often up to 40-50% off when it comes to estimating enrollment in public programs. So for instance, in a year when HFS had 1.4 million children enrolled, CPS estimated they had only 800k. That isn’t an error bar, that is an error. HFS has contracted with the University of Illinois as required to do a survey that will likely much more accurately estimate the real number of uninsured children. Many states are now resorting to having to do their own surveys as the CPS data is so far out of whack. Even those conducting the CPS survey (folks from SHADUC) admit that it has big problems in many states and that this is particularly true in Illinois. They (SHADUC et al) aren’t sure why some states seem to yield further out of whack numbers than others.
Comment by healthcare nerd Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 12:42 pm
Anonymous is also correct about there being no padding of the program. The overall numbers are up. I think we are currently at around 1.442 million children enrolled. It is true that some parents will choose private insurance if they can afford it but many cannot. I have a neighbor who recently had a child and who if they had gone to add dependent coverage where her employer only had single or whole family rather than a more tiered approach, she would have had to spend $700 per month. She definitely didn’t have that much money for health insurance. So her little one is on All Kids. As for the provider issue, with the new Primary Care Case Management program, this issue has been addressed. A lot of my neighbors use All Kids and their children all have primary care providers. It is true however, that specialty care is more difficult, which is why the specialist rate increase is important.
Comment by healthcare nerd Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 12:50 pm
The rap song about Blagojevich is hilarious. It actually has a good beat and you can dance to it (smile).
Comment by this voter will remember Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 1:05 pm
Forgive AA if he is being repetitive, but those planted stories about Pam Davis, the only honest person in corrupt Illinois, make me want to hurl. They always forget to mention the army of lobbyists, including Ladd and Wilhelm, that she paid millions to in previous attempts to get that hospital. Nor do they mention the close proximity of the Plainfield site to her hubby’s “surgicenters.”
Instead, we get “TMI” about the extra wire in Pam’s Maidenform and totally slanderous and unwarranted remarks about the HCFA staff.
Comment by Arthur Andersen Friday, Jan 16, 09 @ 4:17 pm