The Democrat-led state of Oregon is on track to spend $500 million more on a program that includes free health care for illegal migrants than on its state police budget, according to reports.
According to state reports, the Healthier Oregon Program (HOP) has a budget currently set at $1.3 billion. The program, which launched in 2022, has seen a rise of 1,100 percent in costs since it launched. Meanwhile, the Oregon State Police have a budget of just over $717 million.
The Oregon Health Authority website says, “Starting July 1, 2023, immigration/citizenship status no longer affects whether someone qualifies for OHP [Full Oregon Health Plan].”
Assistant Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Tricia McLaughlin blasted the state for its obscenely lopsided budgeting.
“Absurd. Oregon will spend $500 million+ MORE on free health care for immigrants regardless of legal status than on state police in its current budget period,” McLaughlin wrote in a post on X on Tuesday.
“Oregon to spend $1.5 billion in state & federal taxpayer dollars on a program that offers health benefits to illegal aliens from 2025- 2027,” she added. “They budgeted $717 million on Oregon State Police.”
Oregon is one of the Democrat-dominated states that went all-in for free healthcare programs for illegals during the Biden years. But three other deep blue states that made similar moves on health care for migrants have begun pulling back on these promises because the programs are massive budget busters.
California, Illinois, and Minnesota all launched massive health care giveaways to illegals over the last four years, but all three are paring back their programs after costs soared tens of millions beyond what was initially proposed.
As Sally Pipes recently wrote in the National Review, cash-strapped California is shoveling $8.5 billion a year to free health care for illegals. And the program has been so flooded with migrants that actual citizens are finding health care harder to get because wait times have exploded. So Democrat Gov. Gavin Newsom is beginning to cut the program to alleviate the self-made problems.
Minnesota is also scaling back its MinnesotaCare program as the wildly overspent program descends into shortfalls and Gov. Tim Walz is making deep cuts.
Finally, Illinois’s radical left-wing Gov. J.B. Pritzker similarly announced cuts in the state’s freebies to migrants as the Illinois healthcare program soared over budget immediately upon being signed into law in 2020. Each year since 2020, the legislature upped the benefits, but by this year, cuts were finally initiated due to cost overruns in a state that has a budget deficit of $3.2 billion.
To date, unlike its fellow blue states, Oregon has not gotten the memo that millions in freebies to illegals is unsustainable.
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