With more than seven months into the fiscal year without a balanced budget from lawmakers, bills continue to stack up -- especially bills for state employees’ high-end health care plans.

Dan Long, executive director of the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability, says the bills are $2.5 billion and growing. There may have been a willingness from vendors to wait for payments, as they’ve waited in the past, but Long said patience could wear thin.

Goldwater Institute’s Director of Health Care Policy, Naomi Lopez-Bauman, says this is a result of decades of overspending on quote “lavish” health care policies.

The State Journal-Register reports Springfield’s largest hospital systems are owed $76 million dollars for the health care costs of state workers, retirees and their dependents.