Cal Legislature Set to Pass $400 Billion Healthcare Takeover

The Democrat-controlled Legislature’s efforts to establish ‘Healthy California Act’ as a $400 billion a year takeover of the state’s $400 billion in healthcare is about to pass.

With Obamacare either being rescinded by Congressional Republicans or bankrupting due to spiraling costs, the Democrat-controlled California Legislature is set to vote by June 2 on taking over 17.8 percent of the state’s $2.3 trillion gross domestic product. The legislation, officially titled SB-562, would convert the state’s Knox-Keene Health Care Service Plan Act of 1975 that regulates health maintenance organizations (HMO), into a universal state-run single-payer health plan.

Socialized medicine has been the Democrat’s top social justice goal since President Harry Truman, just seven months after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death. Truman proposed a five-point “universal” national health insurance program in his first address to a joint-session of Congress by declaring:

Millions of our citizens do not now have a full measure of opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health. Millions do not now have protection or security against the economic effects of sickness. The time has arrived for action to help them attain that opportunity and that protection.

President Lyndon Baines Johnson would honor Truman 16 years later as “the real daddy of Medicare” and give him the pen Johnson used to sign Medicare and Medicaid into law.

Since the United States Congress first got involved with managing health care through Medicaid in 1965 and Medicare in 1966, America’s GDP has grown by 2,101 percent, from $874 billion to $18.037 trillion. But the America’s annual health care spending bill has skyrocketed during the same period by 7,637 percent, from $41.9 billion to $3.2 trillion.

This disastrous rise in healthcare costs since Johnson enacted Medicaid and Medicare, explains why Republicans have dominated the White House for about two-thirds of the last 58 years. Democrats did get incrementally closer to universal socialized medicine by passing Obamacare in 2010, but it cost them control of both houses of Congress and presidency by 2016.

But Obamacare’s biggest contribution toward a government take-over was the establishment of American Health Benefit Exchanges and the funding to develop “qualified health care plans” and “an essential health benefits package” by January 1, 2014, according to the California Legislative Counsel’s Office.

The LCO highlights that SB 562 would set a universal standard for all federal and state medical benefits, including “the state’s Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), Medi-Cal, ancillary health care or social services covered by regional centers for persons with developmental disabilities, Knox-Keene, and the federal Medicare program.” Healthy California would seek waivers to “receive all federal and state funding, contract with all medical providers, and then centrally pay for all benefits and services.

Healthy California would increase state’s healthcare budget by 1,200 percent from $34 billion in 2017-18 to about $409 billion. It would also quadruple the California State budget from $124 billion to about $533 billion. Such a massive budget expansion would lead to a spectacular expansion of the state’s unionized workforce.

Unfortunately for Democrat sponsors in the California Legislature, SB 562 was amended on May 26 to prohibit the “act from becoming operative until the Secretary of California Health and Human Services gives written notice to the Secretary of the Senate and the Chief Clerk of the Assembly that the Healthy California Trust Fund has the revenues to fund the costs of implementing the act.”