California is introducing legislation to ban private health insurance, forcing all residents into a single-payer system that would further bankrupt a state facing massive deficits.
Karl Marx could have been forecasting the future of California when he said that history repeats itself – first as tragedy, then as farce. The tragedy is a state budget of $225.9 billion this year, with a budget deficit equivalent to nearly one-third of that figure – $73 billion, according to the latest estimate from the state Legislative Analyst's Office.
This fixation on single-payer health care is not just unrealistic. It's sadistic, given that single-payer forces people to wait in long lines for subpar treatment, in large part because low government payments result in persistent shortages of doctors. Look at Britain's National Health Service. British junior doctors have gone on strike 10 times since March 2023. They're paid a pittance to keep a lid on costs. The strikes have only delayed treatments and made waiting times worse.
To escape these horrors, around one in eight Brits pay for private health care outside the public NHS. Our neighbors in Canada face similar woes under their single-payer health care system. According to research from the Fraser Institute, a Vancouver think tank, Canadians face a median wait of nearly 28 weeks for care from a specialist following referral by a general practitioner. In Canada, private insurance is illegal – unlike in the United Kingdom.
Kalra calls his latest bid for single-payer – officially dubbed AB 2200, the California Guaranteed Health Care for All Act – an improvement on his previous efforts. It's hard to see how. He proposes to pass the bill, then ask the federal government for a waiver to divert all the money it delivers to the state for the likes of Medicare and Medicaid into a new 'CalCare' health plan. There's no plan for how to come up with the rest of the money needed to pay for it.
This is, to be blunt, unlikely. The last time single-payer advocates came knocking in Sacramento, they were counting on Gov. Gavin Newsom going along with them to fulfill campaign promises. Staring down a record budget deficit, the governor is highly unlikely to back a wholesale single-payer system. In fact, it's unclear how he'll come up with the $2.6 billion a year he's committed for state-funded coverage for illegal immigrants through Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program.
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