SB-562 The Healthy California Act

Eli,

The bill was introduced in February:

This bill, the Healthy California Act, would create the Healthy California program to provide comprehensive universal single-payer health care coverage and a health care cost control system for the benefit of all residents of the state.

The bill analysis was published recently:

The projected costs and revenue needs for the proposed Program are as follows. For a discussion of the underlying assumptions, see Staff Comments below.

• Total annual costs of about $400 billion per year, including all covered health care services and administrative costs, at full enrollment.
• Existing federal, state, and local funding of about $200 billion could be available to offset a portion of the total program cost.
• About $200 billion in additional tax revenues would be needed to pay for the remainder of the total program cost. Assuming that this cost was raised through a new payroll tax (with no cap on wages subject to the tax), the additional payroll tax rate would be about 15% of earned income.

It is important to note that the overall cost of those new tax revenues would be offset to a large degree by reduced spending on health care coverage by employers and employees. Although precise estimates of total spending for employer sponsored health insurance are not available, the best available information indicates that existing spending is between $100 and $150 billion per year. Therefore, total new spending required under the bill would be between $50 and $100 billion per year.

So $200 billion extra in CA government spending. The current California budget is $122 billion; $86 billion of the state's tax receipts come from personal income taxes.

The question I have for anyone proposing single payer, a question never answered, is, How are you going to pay for it?

Bill