If Democrats in Sacramento are serious about creating a single-payer health care system in California, they aren’t acting like it. As with the last legislative push for single-payer five years ago, the latest effort appears to be nothing more than a political stunt aimed at generating headlines and misleading progressive true believers.
Case in point: last week’s vote in the Assembly Appropriations Committee clearing Assembly Bill 1400, the bill introduced by Assemblyman Ash Kalra, D-San Jose, which would create the “CalCare” single-payer system.
One might think the creation of such a system would yield extensive legislative scrutiny. One might think that the Appropriations Committee, which exists to review bills with a fiscal impact, might scrutinize legislation that would require hundreds of billions of dollars in tax increases.
Instead, last Thursday, as the Los Angeles Times’ George Skelton noted, “The contentious bill, AB 1400, sailed through the Assembly Appropriations Committee on a party-line 11-3 vote without any discussion at all. Shameful.”
“How can a fiscal committee of the Legislature allow a bill to get out of its committee with no funding mechanism?” wondered Republican Assemblyman Vince Fong of Bakersfield, according to Skelton.
This sort of sloppiness reminds us of the last push for single-payer, Senate Bill 562, which was introduced by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego.
The so-called “Healthy California Act” was even more abysmal than the current effort, and carried an estimated price tag of $400 billion per year, which is bigger than the state budget. It also lacked a funding mechanism, yet the state Senate remarkably approved it anyway with a 23-to-14 vote.
Some Democrats at the time, like Sen. Steve Glazer, D-Orinda, had the sense to reject the proposal due to its incompleteness. None of that mattered, though, as the bill was purely for show.
“This is a glorified political stunt which, if it proceeds with the same thoughtlessness shown to date, could do real harm to the state of California,” this editorial board wrote of that effort at the time in 2017.
This effort isn’t much different.
Lara used his spearheading of the comically bad single-payer attempt to promote himself into his current office as insurance commissioner.
If Kalra and fellow lawmakers who claim to be serious about single-payer are actually serious, they should put in serious work and demand thorough public vetting of their proposal.
Anything short of that is a farce and a slap in the face to good government.
Of course, there’s a reason Kalra and fellow proponents don’t want that. They know that the same public that rejected split roll just two years ago will not accept the sort of crushing tax increases required to finance a takeover of health care by a state government that can’t even distribute unemployment checks correctly.