Earlier this month we reported that California was in a bit of a quandary. They were bound and determined to have a single payer health plan for their citizens no matter what the Republicans wanted to do on the national level. And by golly, they got a plan put together in the state legislature and moved it out of committee, despite the fact that it was going to cost more than the total GDP of the state.
Then it made it out onto the floor of the Assembly. As Leslie Eastman of Legal Insurrection tells us, the cold light of day seems to have given some of the legislators second thoughts and the plan has gone back on the shelf.
I recently reported that California Senate Bill 562, which would establish a single payer healthcare system within the state, had recently cleared a major hurdle by passing through a state legislative committee.Really? The bill was “woefully incomplete?” Which part, exactly? I’m just taking a shot in the dark here, but it might be the bit about “financing, delivery of care, cost controls.” You mean you couldn’t figure out those details once it came out of committee?
However, the measure died upon entering the California Assembly.
A high-profile effort to establish a single-payer healthcare system in California sputtered Friday when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) decided to shelve the proposal.
Rendon announced late Friday afternoon that the bill, Senate Bill 562 by state Sens. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), would not advance to a policy hearing in his house, making it all but certain the measure will not be acted upon this year.
“SB 562 was sent to the Assembly woefully incomplete,” Rendon said in a statement. “Even senators who voted for SB 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation.”
While you consider that news, keep in mind that this is what the liberals in not only California but around the rest of the nation want to push on the entire country. And that attitude remains even after the dismal day when none other than the Washington Post threw in the towel and said that it might just sink the fiscal ship.
The government’s price tag would be astonishing. When Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a “Medicare for all” health plan in his presidential campaign, the nonpartisan Urban Institute figured that it would raise government spending by $32 trillion over 10 years, requiring a tax increase so huge that even the democratic socialist Mr. Sanders did not propose anything close to it.Much of this is a problem of scale. The smaller the population of a given country or state and the more they are already used to socialist style control of all their assets, the easier it is to pull off something approaching single payer. (But even in Canada, with their tiny population and devoted socialist climate they’ve run into serious delivery problems, wait times and a hard time finding doctors.) When you crank it up to even the size of a state like California the balloon bursts quickly.
Single-payer advocates counter that government-run health systems in other developed countries spend much less than the United States does on its complex public-private arrangement. They say that if the United States adopted a European model, it could expand coverage to everyone by realizing a mountain of savings with no measureable decline in health outcomes, in part because excessive administrative costs and profit would be wrung from the system.
In fact, the savings would be less dramatic; the Urban Institute’s projections are closer to reality. The public piece of the American health-care system has not proven itself to be particularly cost-efficient.
But fear not, California, because I HAVE A PLAN. Your problems will soon be a thing of the past. You know how west coast liberals are always preaching the evils of giving “tax cuts to the rich” and how the wealthiest among us should pay their fair share? Surely that applies at the state level also. With that in mind, I invite any California legislators to steal this idea from me at no cost and introduce the “Movie Star Single Payer Subsidization Act of 2017.”
Under this bold plan, every Hollywood Star, Writer, Director, Producer or Studio executive who earns more than two million dollars in a single year will generously forfeit all income in excess of that amount to fund a single payer health care system for the state. On top of that, the movie studios will be even more helpful. The profits from all films which exceed 25% of the production costs will go into the same fund. Just working off the back of a napkin here it seems to me that they could recover a nice chunk of that $400B this year alone with room to spare.
That may sound drastic, but I know what big fans of Barack Obama you all were for the last eight years, so let’s keep in mind what he said. At some point, you’ve made enough money, right?
