Report: State spent $9M on immigrants who can’t prove legal status

bostonherald.com
By Kyle Cheney / State House News Service
Monday, October 31, 2011

About 1 percent of the $9.6 billion the state spent on Medicaid claims last fiscal year covered services for immigrants who couldn’t prove their legal status, according to figures released by the Patrick administration in response to a Republican lawmaker who had threatened to hold up a key spending bill earlier this month until he got the data he requested.

In a letter to the lawmaker, Rep. James Lyons of Andover, Secretary of Health and Human Services JudyAnn Bigby apologized for the delay in providing the information and offered a breakdown of spending on the Medicaid program, also called MassHealth.

Spending on 54,732 “immigrants who have not provided documentationâ€