FAIR Take | May 2025
Illinois’ Democratic governor, JB Pritzker, has long positioned himself as a staunch advocate for sanctuary policies and taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens. Now, fiscal realities have caught up with the governor. Facing a budget shortfall for Fiscal Year 2026, Pritzker has announced he will cut a program that provides health insurance to illegal alien adults between the ages of 42 and 64, an initiative that was expected to cost Illinois taxpayers $404 million this year. A related program covering illegal aliens aged 65 and older will remain in place.
Specifically, Pritzker’s new budget proposal will cut the Health Benefits for Immigrant Adults (HBIA). HBIA, introduced in 2021, provided health care coverage to low-income adults, regardless of immigration status, aged 42 to 64 who were ineligible for Medicaid due to their immigration status. The program is now scheduled to end on July 1, 2025. Illinois has a similar program for seniors 65 and older, called Health Benefits for Immigrant Seniors (HBIS), but this program is not being cut at this time.
HBIA covers approximately 31,500 individuals– mainly illegal aliens – costing Illinois taxpayers approximately $404 million in 2025, or nearly $13,000 per enrollee. This price tag is nearly double the program’s cost in 2023 ($220 million). The program for seniors, HBIS, is a smaller program covering an additional 11,800 individuals at an estimated cost of $134 million.
Predictably, many open-borders activists are unhappy with the cuts. For example, Rep. Barbara Hernandez stated that “[t]here’s a huge need in the undocumented community that cannot get health care otherwise.” However, the minority leader in the Illinois House, Rep. Ryan Spain, argued that “[t]he high cost of the program outweighs some of the arguments proponents make,” adding that “[i]t’s an unaffordable beacon to attract additional illegal immigrants to the state of Illinois.”
Supporters of providing public benefits to illegal aliens often argue that illegal aliens pay taxes, and, therefore, should be entitled to get something back from the system. This argument ignores the fact that the aliens are only in this country because they broke our immigration laws and many of them are working illegally. It also ignores the fact that, as demonstrated in FAIR’s study of the fiscal burden of illegal immigration, illegal aliens receive considerably more in tax credits and other taxpayer-funded benefits than they contribute.
In addition to Illinois, the District of Columbia and six other states extend similar health benefits to illegal aliens. California, Minnesota, and Oregon offer state-funded health insurance to illegal aliens; Colorado and Washington state offer financial help for illegal aliens to purchase health insurance in the private market; and New York offers coverage to illegal alien seniors. Of these states, California faces a $12 billion budget deficit and thus, in spite of its historically staunchly pro-illegal-alien stance, its Democratic governor Gavin Newsom recently made the decision to freeze its Medi-Cal program. The reason is simple: the cost of insuring its 1.6 million illegal alien recipients exceeded the state government’s original cost estimates by $2.7 billion, a predicament similar to that of Illinois, but with significantly larger numbers. What this shows, among other things, is that initial cost estimates of welfare programs for illegal aliens should be treated with skepticism and viewed as a floor rather than a ceiling.
The case of Illinois makes clear that benefits such as taxpayer-funded health insurance for illegal aliens are costly. Providing these benefits also rewards and incentivizes illegal immigration. Hopefully, recent decisions by Governors Newsom and Pritzker will lead to a much-needed debate about the unfairness of spending taxpayer resources on individuals with no legal right to reside in the country.
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