Are you in need of a simple breakdown of the California Single Payer Bill? Mother Jones has you covered:
Who’d be covered under the single-payer system?
Everyone who lives in California (including college students, if their university decides to pay for the coverage) [including the] 3 million Californians [currently] without coverage.
What would be covered?
Pretty much everything you can imagine. Healthy California would cover almost any sort of medical care, including things like dental, vision, and long-term care… you’d be able to see any licensed doctor, and they’d be free to prescribe treatments they deem necessary.
How much would health care cost me under the plan?
Nothing. The state wouldn’t charge any premiums. There would be no copay charge during a visit, no co-insurance, no deductibles. Prescriptions would be also be free. Out-of-pocket expenses would completely disappear…
Healthy California would cost the state $400 billion per year…
an estimated total of $367 billion [was spent] on health care in California…
so new spending would be about $50 billion [for covering everyone, seeing any doctor, and getting any treatment]
Let’s take a break here to point out a few things:
1. Citizens for Tax Justice concluded: “Multinational corporations’ use of tax havens allows them to avoid an estimated $90 billion in federal income taxes each year.”
2. Tech companies hoard more cash than any other industry. Apple, Google’s parent firm Alphabet, Microsoft, Cisco and Oracle hold the most, according to research and ratings firm Moody’s. The five firms’ cash reserves will hit $587 billion by year’s end, Moody’s projects, with 86 percent of that money, or $505 billion, parked overseas.
3. Half of the top 10 California cities with the lowest effective tax rates are in Silicon Valley, with median home prices above $1 million: Palo Alto, Millbrae, Los Altos, Burlingame and Sunnyvale… Had Californians paid a 1 percent tax on their homes’ true value, instead of the Prop. 13 assessed values, local governments in the state would have received $12.5 billion more in revenue, the study found.
Nobody who claims to be an honest broker gets to tell anyone with a brain that California can’t afford an extra $50B to cover ALL of our citizens with REAL healthcare coverage. I’m looking at you Jerry Brown. Stop treating us like we’re stupid!!
If I like my plan, can I keep it?
Not unless you go to the VA, the only non-Healthy California system that would remain in place. Private insurance would no longer exist.
So California can do this all by itself?
Nope. The single-payer bill relies on the assumption that the state will be able to redirect current federal health spending—Medicare, Obamacare, Mediciad, etc.—into the Healthy California program. That would require waivers from the Trump administration
So what’s next?
The Senate passed the bill last week, but because lawmakers were rushing to meet a deadline, they didn’t really finish the necessary work on it. It now heads to the Assembly, which also faces impending deadlines if it wants to enact something this year. The legislation would need to clear the Assembly’s policy committee by July 14 and would then need to be approved by the full Assembly, passed by the state Senate once more, and signed by the governor by early September.
But before the Assembly can even take a vote, a lot more work needs to be done. The bill the Senate voted on lays out the broad overview of how the health care plan would work and what it would cover. But it leaves the funding question mostly untouched. The Assembly will have to figure out how the necessary revenue will be generated.
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The only reality-based hurdle to this is the Trump administration, and yes it likely means we’ll need to wait for a new administration to finalize this. But if it dies in California, then it dies because California’s leadership isn’t being honest with its citizens. And those leaders will have hell to pay.