Illinois’s top Medicaid contactor has repeatedly failed to meet benchmarks to provide medical care for foster children around the state, despite receiving hundreds of millions in payments.
That’s the finding of an investigation by the Illinois Answers Project, the new investigative arm of WMAY’s watchdog partners, the Better Government Association. The investigation found that Centene had been paid $370 million since 2020 to manage health care for more than 36,000 current and former foster children.
But fewer than two-thirds of those children had a dental visit, immunizations, or regular checkups in that time, and only 22-percent had a health screening upon entering the foster system.
