PORTLAND (AP) - Even with the state well into an economic recovery, the number of Oregonians who qualify for food stamps, welfare and free medical care keeps growing.

The counterintuitive combination caused state forecasters to vastly underestimate how many people would qualify for government help in the current 2005-07 budget. The missed estimate has contributed heavily to a $172 million budget shortfall that the state Department of Human Services revealed this week.

State leaders will start trying to fix the problem next month, and legislative leaders have raised the possibility of special session. Lawmakers hope to plug the gap without cutting services to the poor, but they have yet to figure out a way to do that.

The Department of Human Services is the state's largest agency with a two-year budget of $9.8 billion.

Judy Mohr-Peterson, who was appointed two months to head a client-caseload forecasting team, said the estimates used to build the 2005-07 budget were off because DHS caseloads showed more growth than at any time since the Oregon Health Plan was launched in 1993.

“Even though we have had a recovering economy, we have also had population growth, and the percentage of our people living under the poverty level has grown,” Mohr-Peterson said.

Another factor, she noted, is the type of jobs being created in the recovery. Most are low-wage service-sector jobs without health insurance.

State forecasters missed almost 30,000 people. They correctly predicted the Oregon Health Plan would shrink, but failed to realize how many people cut off from that program would qualify under the law for regular Medicaid coverage.

Moreover, the forecasters underestimated the caseload of blind and disabled people, and the state is seeing higher-than-projected caseloads for welfare and other programs serving children and families.