Can any of our savvy progressive poster friends explain how CA with a big budget surplus and a single party stranglehold on power was not able to offer single payer coverage to its citizens and immigrant dependents?
California could lead the national effort by showing that the biggest state economy can afford to cover its residents with health care.
Yet it flopped with a big thud…is it all just a big lie…a big sardine for the voter seals?
Looks that way to me.
SACRAMENTO — Lawmakers declined to vote on a high-profile effort to overhaul California’s healthcare system on Monday, putting an end to a proposal that would have guaranteed medical coverage to every resident by levying billions in new taxes. Assembly Bill 1400 by Assemblyman Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) did not have the necessary votes to move forward ahead of a key deadline Monday. Instead of forcing a vote that could be politically damaging for some of his Democratic colleagues, Kalra opted to let the bill die, angering the California Nurses Assn. that has championed single-payer for years.
Nevermind the fact the answer is in the article. They didn’t figure out how to properly finance it until recently and even then they created taxes to only possibly cover half of it.
There’s virtue signaling. Then there’s facing reality. CA lawmakers faced the reality that welfare in most of its forms draws the worst element to its borders… the takers… not the doers and makers. They over achieved in their noisy drunken virtue signaling and received a knock at their door at 3 AM by their landlord, Mr Reality.
We have been told repeatedly that blue states are the givers and that red states are the takers of federal tax disbursement.
If CA can’t do this, then scaling it up will never work.
“AB 1400 was a disaster in the making and an unnecessary distraction from the real work of creating a healthcare system that can provide affordable, high-quality care to all Californians,” said Jim Wunderman, president and chief executive of the Bay Area Council. “It was unworkable and would have cost California taxpayers and businesses hundreds of billions in new taxes, with little or no hope that it would ever produce any results.”
Assembly Republican leader Marie Waldron of Escondido praised Democrats who helped stop the “foolhardy plan.”
“Better late than never,” Waldron said. “The fact that a proposal for a government takeover of our state’s entire healthcare system even made it this far shows just how out of touch the Democratic Party is from the needs of everyday Californians.”
Yes California certainly can try to figure out away to pay for a single payer system. That of course doesn’t mean that it is dead on arrival on the National Level because a state congressman could not figure out how to fully fund his bill…
How is Massachusetts working out with a longer run of universal coverage? They aren’t ready for single payer either and the costs are escalating thanks to Covid.
All of that effort comes at a cost.
"The hospital team members haven’t gotten a break," Hudson-Jinks said. "The holidays have come and gone and each and every day and each and every minute of every day, we’re busy."
Kerry Noonan and Rich Henlotter are nurses at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They see the strain of staffing and exhaustion every day.
"I think tolerance levels are being stretched beyond a lot of people’s capacity," Noonan said. "But, what do you do? You can’t walk away. The building is burning, I’m not going to walk away."
"I’d like a break," Henlotter said. "I’d like to know there’s an end in this, because how long are we expected to maintain this? We’re people just like you."
