California’s Healthcare System: Access Or Illusion?

California lawmakers and lobbyists pride themselves on a commitment to healthcare access, and much of their legislative history involves measures purportedly aimed at its expansion. But the devil is in the details… and the definitions. 

How exactly should we define healthcare access, and how is California helping its residents achieve it?

More Tax-Funded Physicians?

Proposition 35, California’s successful November ballot measure, makes permanent the “temporary” tax-funded subsidy for providers who accept Medi-Cal insurance. Medi-Cal (also funded by taxes) pays less than private insurance, so some providers decline to accept it. Subsidies incentivize more doctors to serve the 15 million patients in the program. 

The measure seemed immensely popular, running with no formal opposing arguments or funding, and it won by a vote of 68%. Supporters emphasized it would not even increase taxes. But in reality, the proposition had many detractors, albeit ones with little clout or money to advertise or explain their opposition. This program will cost taxpayers up to $5 billion per year, and it may render California ineligible for federal funding. 

This bill garnered public support because it benefitted the small—but wealthy and influential—percentage of the population in healthcare services and politics. Medical doctors will get more money, and politicians will get more votes from their increasingly impoverished residents, who see only the immediate relief from healthcare stress.

In the short term, having more willing doctors lessens pressure on the healthcare system. But no matter how badly proponents want to believe otherwise, sound economic theory shows taxing and subsidizing always cause long-term damage to the overall economy. California is already more than half a trillion dollars in debt and is hemorrhaging both money and taxpayers at an alarming rate. Its subsidies obfuscate the accelerating collapse of the state’s healthcare programs.  

Healthcare Minimum Wage Increases?

Mere months before passing Proposition 35, California enacted a minimum wage increase for 420,000 healthcare employees. Over the course of several years, these workers will see their hourly rates reach at least $25. Theoretically, this will incentivize more people to enter the healthcare field in the lower-paid tiers.

Unfortunately, this plan is mired in problems similar to those surrounding physician subsidies. Gov. Gavin Newsom has struggled to finalize the dates and details of the raise, repeatedly postponing it, due to California’s severe financial woes. The plan will cost California $4 billion, and it is simply in too much debt to take on more. Lawmakers are dipping into numerous pots of tax funds in an attempt to find the money. 

Again, these legislators are creating a facade of healthcare access, with no real backing. And again, residents will benefit for a short time, followed by further economic collapse.

‘Free’ Insurance For All?

At the beginning of the year, California became the first state to extend “free” insurance to all eligible residents, including any of the nearly 2 million illegal immigrants who qualify financially. This feel-good move naturally requires more tax dollars, redistributed from residents who are already throwing money into a seeming black hole. 

Proponents claim health care is a human right, and they question the compassion of anyone who would argue otherwise. But the question is not whether people have the right to service, but whether California legislators have the right to the free labor of other residents, many of whom are working a large portion of each day to pay taxes.

Supporters have been especially misleading in their framing of this issue, asserting opponents are bigoted elitists who do not want other ethnicities or the needy to receive care. But it should be clear by this point that the people profiting most from these laws are the people responsible for making them. Whether well intended or not, the rules are turning California from a healthcare haven for immigrants to a place resembling the poverty-stricken countries they fled. 

More Taxes?

The three bills mentioned above were just some of the healthcare legislation enacted this year, and they do not differ substantially from any of the other legislation that has failed in the past. Both history and logic prove central planners are just giving false hope to desperate patients in California.

The voters can demand course correction from their legislators, or they can continue to hope laws will magically create healthcare access. By this week’s 50.8% vote against an overall minimum wage hike, they showed a slim majority recognized the futility of these measures. Economic policy is more science than art, and, hopefully, Californians are realizing no amount of future creative legislation will make more access materialize.