State health tab for immigrants: $93M

By Kyle Cheney / State House News Service

BOSTON � 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 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, state 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.

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