The Healthy California Act, SB-562, was submitted in February and continues to slowly move through committees with one of its largest hurdles coming up—figuring out how to pay for it. The bill itself would require the state’s legislature to establish a “comprehensive universal single-payer health care coverage program and a health care cost control system for the benefit of all residents of the state.” On Monday, analysts of the Senate Appropriations Committee said that a single-payer system would cost $400 billion a year and require significant tax increases.
California would have to find an additional $200 billion per year, including in new tax revenues, to create a so-called “single-payer” system, the analysis by the Senate Appropriations Committee found. The estimate assumes the state would retain the existing $200 billion in local, state and federal funding it currently receives to offset the total $400 billion price tag.
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Employers currently spend between $100 billion to $150 billion per year, which could be available to help offset total costs, according to the analysis. Under that scenario, total new spending to implement the system would be between $50 billion and $100 billion per year.
The next step will be for people to come up with a way to pay for this system, and the bill will have to wait for that proposal.
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The analysis proposes one scenario in which a new payroll tax on employers — with a rate of 15% of earned income — could supply the new revenue. But the measure itself does not contain a specific tax proposal, and therefore would not, at this point, need a two-thirds vote to approve a new tax.
The fact of the matter is that healthcare costs are continuing to go up and the Republican plan of sticking your head in the dirt until everybody dies isn’t a good plan. State Sen. Ricardo Lara, one of the original proponents of the bill, continues to pound this simple fact home.
“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.”
Community member jpmassar and other activists in the Daily Kos community and around the state have been increasingly motivated to organize and make our elected officials do the right thing and show the rest of the country, by example, what the sun looks like outside of the commodified healthcare dungeon we’ve been living in.