by Tyler Durden
Back in February, a gaggle of California Senators introduced Senate Bill 562, a publicly funded universal healthcare system otherwise conveniently marketed as “The Healthy California Act”…because who in their right mind would oppose Californians being healthy? Presumably “The California Single-Payer Healthcare System, Courtesy of A Back-Breaking $400 Billion Tax, Act” was passed over because the truth isn’t quite so ‘marketable’ in this particular case.
Unfortunately, while catchy protest slogans like “Healthcare is a Human Right” sound so appealing, the cost of the Liberal healthcare end goal (i.e. a “Single-Payer System”), as some California Senators are finding out today, is somewhat ‘cost prohibitive’. According to a study by California’s Senate Appropriations Committee, the price tag of SB562 is around $400 billion a year, which just happens to be a little over 2x Cali’s entire annual budget.
And while we understand from our Democratic friends that paying taxes is “patriotic,” we suspect that a fair number of people in California may be opposed to a doubling of their state taxes, which are already the highest in the country…but that’s just a hunch.
The idea behind Senate Bill 562, according to the Sacramento Bee, was to overhaul California’s insurance marketplace, reduce overall health care costs and expand coverage to everyone in the state regardless of immigration status or ability to pay. Instead of private insurers, state government would be the “single payer” for everyone’s health care through a new payroll taxing structure, similar to the way Medicare operates…because governments are so efficient at operating massive bureaucracies like Medicare.
“Health care spending is growing faster than the overall economy … yet we do not have better health outcomes and we cover fewer people,” Lara said at Monday’s appropriations hearing. “Given this picture of increasing costs, health care inefficiencies and the uncertainty created by Congress, it is critical that California chart our own path.”
Lara and Atkins say they are driven by the belief that health care is a human right and should be guaranteed to everyone, similar to public services like safe roads and clean drinking water. They seek to rein in rising health care costs by lowering administrative expenses, reducing expensive emergency room visits, and eliminating insurance company profits and executive salaries.
The “health care is a human right” argument is a favorite of the liberal elites. Of course, the problem is that argument can be applied to a endless stream of goods and services. Should “universal wages” be a human right? How about a ‘car’ for every working age adult…after all how can people be expected to work if they can’t afford transportation to work? The application of this twisted logic has no end….
Meanwhile, insurance groups, health plans and Kaiser Permanente are against the bill due to the “prohibitive expense”. Business groups, including the California Chamber of Commerce, have deemed the bill a “job-killer.”
“A single-payer system is massively, if not prohibitively expensive,” said Nick Louizos, vice president of legislative affairs for the California Association of Health Plans.
“It will cost employers and taxpayers billions of dollars and result in significant loss of jobs in the state,” the Chamber of Commerce said in its opposition letter.
The bill has to get approval on the Senate floor by June 2 to advance to the Assembly.