* Hannah Meisel at the Daily Line…

The state of Illinois has lost out on an estimated $10.7 million in federal matching dollars during the past four fiscal years as a result of “miscoding errors” that marked American citizens or permanent residents as undocumented in the state’s Covering All Kids health insurance program, according to a new audit.

Auditor General Frank Mautino’s office found the state likely lost out on $2.6 million in federal matching dollars in the 2018 fiscal year because of the persistent and widespread errors within the All Kids program, noting this has been an issue since the first time the program was audited a decade ago. […]

All Kids, which offers universal health care to Illinois children regardless of how much their family earned, was expanded a few years later to include undocumented immigrant children. But Illinois’ Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act moved some citizens and documented immigrants to Medicaid, instead of the expanded All Kids program.

Though the participation rate of undocumented immigrant children in All Kids has dropped precipitously in the past decade — from 54,000 in 2009 to 22,000 in 2018 — the new audit found that number inaccurate. In the 2018 fiscal year, Mautino’s office found more than 4,200 All Kids recipients who had been listed as undocumented, but actually had verified social security numbers or alien registration numbers.