The news media are already working overtime to portray Gov. Gavin Newsom, D-French Laundry, as moderating his positions ahead of a possible presidential run in 2028. Don’t you believe it.
Legislation that the governor recently signed into law would take new steps to foist a single-payer health care system on the nation’s largest state. That Newsom would have few qualms about doing so demonstrates an ideology far more radical than his allies would like to portray.
Big-Government Outline
The legislation does not on its own establish a single-payer system in California. Doing so would cost significant sums of money, even as the state had to scramble to close a $30 billion budget deficit this summer.
Instead, the bill directs the state’s secretary of health and human services to spend the next two years developing a waiver application to the federal government. Lawmakers hope the waiver would give California federal resources to achieve its supposed socialist utopia.
As such, the five-page bill only includes broad-brush parameters of how the single-payer system will work, relying on state bureaucrats to flesh out the details over the coming two years. But the parameters provide a troubling view of the road ahead for the Golden State.
Among other provisions, the bill states that the new system should provide:
“Services that will not vary by age [or] employment status.” This provision implies that California residents who currently receive health coverage through their jobs will no longer do so. Or, to put it more bluntly, “If you
