Time to pay their fair share.
As the deadline to pass a budget before another credit downgrade approached, a federal judge ordered the State of Illinois to make more than $500 million each month in Medicaid payments.
U.S. District Judge Joan Lefkow ordered the state to pay $586 million a month for Medicaid vouchers that come in after June 30. On top of that, Lefkow ordered the state to pay another $2 billion toward the more than $3 billion Illinois owes to managed care organizations, which process payments to Medicaid providers, according to court records.
Her order came after a hearings this week in Chicago in the decades-old lawsuit over $2 billion in unpaid Medicaid bills.
At a hearing Wednesday, an attorney for the state said Illinois can’t come close to finding a spare $500 million — it could pay $150 million at best, with half of that coming from the federal government.
Earlier this month, Lefkow ruled that Illinois was not in compliance with court orders to pay health care bills for low-income and other vulnerable groups.
She previously wrote that state officials “have not lived up to their agreements” in the civil case that dates back to the 1990s, when Illinois first entered into a court-enforced consent decree requiring that it keep up Medicaid payments even through the kinds of financial crises the state is currently in.