Oregon spends more budget on free health care for immigrants than it does on state police

By EMIILY KOPP | DAILY CALLER NEWS FOUNDATION

Oregon will spend more in its current budget period on free health care for immigrants regardless of legal status than on state police by $500 million or more, according to state officials and budget documents.

Oregon officials expect to spend $1.5 billion in combined state and federal taxpayer dollars on a program that offers health benefits to illegal aliens from 2025 to 2027. They expect to spend $717 million on Oregon State Police over the same period, the documents indicate.

The state’s health agency, the Oregon Health Authority, said in an email to the Daily Caller News Foundation that the state expects to allocate $1.2 billion to the program — originally named “Cover All People” and now called the “Healthier Oregon Program” (HOP). Oregon lays out budgets in two-year “bienniums.”

The federal government will supply 25% of the funding to provide health benefits to illegal aliens in Oregon, the OHA told the DCNF.

The data emblematizes some of the Democratic stronghold’s policy priorities — facilitating illegal immigrants’ access to health care and reducing criminal crackdowns. These very policies have touched off a government shutdown in Washington, D.C., and protests in Portland.

Medicaid — the joint federal-state program that traditionally provided health services to children, pregnant mothers and disabled adults — formally bars illegal immigrants from receiving benefits.

But some blue states have innovated creative accounting methods to extract federal dollars without the federal restrictions, according to the Paragon Health Institute, a non-partisan policy research group. Blue states will issue taxes on Medicaid insurers and providers, obtain a bundle of federal matching dollars for those funds, then return the taxed money to those institutions, the think tank points out.

Spending on health services for illegal aliens in Oregon has climbed by at least 1100% since the program’s introduction roughly four years ago.