Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
“The Medicaid insurers’ annual reports for last year show they earned substantial profits from their Illinois contracts.” Well, of course they did. Illinois taxpayers pay the private-sector MCO’s so much that the MCO’s simply don’t care about fraud and waste among SEIU’s tens of thousands of Medicaid home health care aides. They don’t have to. Why worry about the millions upon millions of dollars paid to in-home health aides (friends-n-family of the disabled) that result from personal assistants “working” many more hours than are allowed by the MCO’s service plans? If you can bank a healthy profit and not worry… Read more »