Chicago Daily Observer

Dear Governor Blagojevich,

On April 15, 2008, the Circuit Court in this action issued a preliminary injunction enjoining your Medicaid FamilyCare program for failing to meet certain statutory prerequisites. The other constitutional and non-constitutional objections to what your Administration have yet to be addressed. As a result, at the present the approximately 25,000 persons and families enrolled in the program are now without health insurance coverage they paid for and the doctors, clinics, hospitals that provided medical services in reliance on their getting paid under the Mediciaid FamilyCare Health Insurance Program either won’t be getting paid ever, or, if you are successful in your appeal, for many months or years to come. This is tragic for many people who relied on you and your Administration that they were covered under the new Mediciaid FamilyCare Health Insurance Program and that you could create such a program on your own authority without ... Read More...

Dear Governor,

Your criticism of those who oppose your recent expansions of healthcare programs to persons who do not satisfy established legislatively approved eligibility requirements as being **** Scrooge-like in many ways,” is telling. What you don’t understand is that concerned citizens and taxpayers like myself, who are fully supportive of making basic healthcare available to all, want those reforms to be achieved in a constitutional manner. The Separations of Powers Provision in our State Constitution strictly prohibits the Executive from infringing upon or exercising the powers the Constitution exclusively reserves for the Legislature to exercise. It is for the Legislature to decide to amend, expand public assistance programs, enact new ones, and to determine the funding that will be made available for each such program.