Twenty million dollars. One hundred seventy-three illegal immigrants.
That works out to $115,607 per person — more than the median Washington state household brings home in an entire year.
And every dime came from Washington state taxpayers.
The Washington State Standard reported that a Democrat-backed healthcare program designed to cover illegal immigrants burned through $20 million in funding while serving just 173 individuals. The program launched after the Trump administration ended Medicaid coverage for illegal immigrants — a move Democrats in Olympia treated like a five-alarm fire. Their solution was to build a state-funded replacement program. The replacement caught almost nobody. The bill was spectacular.
The original target was modest: cover 300 illegal immigrants during the 2026-27 fiscal year, with an eventual goal of reaching 1,200. Hitting that first milestone would require $100 million, according to program estimates. Scaling to 1,200 would cost another $100 million every year after that.
Do the math. The state spent $20 million to cover 173 people. The ask to cover 300 is $100 million. The ask to cover 1,200 is $100 million annually — and counting. Meanwhile, an estimated 14,000 illegal immigrants in Washington are still projected to lose Medicaid coverage by October.
The program served 173. It needs $100 million to reach 300. The math does not get better.
Adam Glickman, Secretary-Treasurer of the politically powerful left-wing SEIU 775 union, called the results "disappointing and frustrating" and said the union was "pushing for them to do as much as they can." That is a generous framing for a program that spent $115,000 per person and still fell 127 short of its own first milestone.
Democrat Representative Nicole Macri has been among those championing the effort. The pitch is compassion. The arithmetic is $115,607 per patient. When a program burns public money at a rate that exceeds what most Washington families earn in a year, "compassion" starts to function as a line item nobody audited.
Here is what American citizens are waiting on while Washington writes those checks.
More than 190 rural hospitals have closed across the country since 2010, and nearly 700 more are considered at risk of closure. The Phoenix VA scandal of 2014 — where veterans died on secret waiting lists while bureaucrats falsified records — produced a decade of reform promises and wait times that still run weeks to months for specialty care at facilities across the country. A 2023 Commonwealth Fund survey found that more than a quarter of American adults skipped doses or rationed prescriptions in the past year because they could not afford them.
Washington found $20 million. The program served 173 illegal immigrants.
At $115,000 per person, this is a procurement scandal wearing a lab coat. The program's defenders will say that denying care is cruelty. The real question is why a program this expensive, this inefficient, and this far short of its own targets keeps getting defended at all — and whose taxes are paying for it.
The alternative is competence. Apparently that's not in the budget either.