3 Key Facts About California’s ‘Medicare for Illegals’ Plan

The State of California is about to pass a new healthcare plan that attempts to support and expand Obamacare, partly by providing free health care to some adult illegal aliens.

The new plan is covered in a budget passed last week, as Politico reported Sunday. It has been the top priority of the new government of Governor Gavin Newson, whose first act as governor was to propose using Medi-Cal, the state’s Medicaid program, to cover “young undocumented adults.”

There are three things to know about the forthcoming plan.

1. California will become the first state to provide free health care to illegal alien adults. California already provides Medi-Cal to the children of illegal aliens up to age 19. The new plan is estimated to cover 90,000 people at a cost of $98 million annually. The new benefits create a new incentive for illegal aliens to come to the country and to California in particular, which already has nearly a quarter of the nation’s illegal alien population (but only 12% of the total population).

2. California will restore the individual mandate in Obamacare. Californians will face a penalty if they fail to purchase health insurance — the same penalty that President Donald Trump and the GOP eliminated in their tax reform of 2017. As Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association told Politico, that means legal residents will be forced to subsidize illegal aliens.

3. Even California can’t afford “Medicare for All.” The California plan is ambitious: as Fox News reported, “Families of four earning as much as $150,500 a year would get help paying monthly health insurance premiums.” But even far-left California does not go as far as providing “Medicare for All,” despite the fact that Democrats want such a plan (and even passed one in the California State Senate in 2017). The problem: even California cannot figure out how to pay for the proposal.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.