By Will Swaim
Monday, March 07,
2022
yes fixed on other things, you may
have missed the Los
Angeles Times’ recent post-mortem of a very
California coup — the attempted state takeover of health care led by the
powerful California Nurses Association (CNA) and the Service Employees
International Union (SEIU).
Since then, the Times reports,
the unions and their allies across the nation have carefully studied the
disaster and drawn precisely the wrong lessons from their defeat. Regrouping
now, they’ve promised to return in 2023 — and to impose their Great Idea on
you, wherever you live.
Here’s the background: The CNA drafted and
lobbied for AB 1400, a state assembly bill that would have created CalCare, a
kind of DMV for California health care. CalCare would be a “single-payer”
system, a government-run health-care system that eliminates private insurers
and gives government regulators the power to dictate the activities of anyone
associated with medicine. The regulators would set prices, practices, staffing,
prescriptions, tests, and more. CalCare would do all that and would —
remarkably! — double taxes in what’s already the most taxed state in the
nation.
If you’re a Californian, the words
“government-run” and “tax hike” hit you in that part of the brain that knows,
but perhaps without detail, that you’d better run. That’s because California is
a state run by government unions and the politicians they bankroll.
Representing 12 percent of the nation’s population, we are home to 25 percent
of the nation’s government-union members. That’s why our public schools can’t
actually educate our kids. That’s why myriad, overlapping government agencies
have killed new home construction — sending home prices into the stratosphere
and chundering tens of thousands into tent camps on our streets. As crime
spikes, our lawmakers rail against police. Government regulators can’t generate
electricity without burning down a third of the state. At the height of the
Covid lockdown, our unemployment department discovered (too late!) it had sent
$30 billion in federal benefits to international crime gangs and small-time
fraudsters. Putting itself in charge of government retirees, state officials
can’t figure out how we’re going to pay the hundreds of billions it promised
those public employees. We can’t run the ports that are the single biggest
piece of the American supply-chain crisis.
So, we Californians don’t so much hear as
we feel the words “government-run” and “tax hike” as they’re
spoken, the egressive phonemes brushing across the tiny hairs on our arms. It’s
probably unnecessary for me to say that this is a feeling closely associated
with terror, and that the picture forming in our California brains is of a
feckless state regulator driving CalCare at high speed into a concrete freeway
embankment, igniting a massive orange and black fireball, and stranding half a
million drivers on their way to work — every day for the rest of our lives.
Knowing all that, you likely understand
why CalCare died an ignominious death on January 31. On that day, the
assemblyman herding AB 1400 through the legislature looked around and saw few
supporters among his sheepish colleagues. Forcing a public vote on the bill
would have put his liberal colleagues in the crosshairs of two groups: on the
one hand, powerful government unions working to control health care, and on the
other hand, moderate Democrats, voters, and everybody who can do math and/or who
pays taxes.
He pulled the bill before it suffered a humiliating
loss on an Assembly floor controlled entirely by Democrats. He pulled the bill
so that, if by some miracle the legislature passed it, he would not risk
Governor Gavin Newsom’s reelection campaign by forcing him to sign or veto the
bill. Newsom had already signaled his opposition by going completely, weirdly
silent, ghosting the very unions whom he had rallied to his 2018 candidacy by
saying he was “tired of politicians saying they support single-payer but that
it’s too soon, too expensive or someone else’s problem.” Suddenly, it’s clear,
Newsom is that politician.
But in the Times’ “Demise of
single-payer healthcare in California trips up efforts in other states,”
reporter Angela Hart writes that the California Nurses Association, SEIU, and
their allies “in Colorado, Washington state, and elsewhere say that rather than
giving up, they are taking key lessons from California’s failure: It is
essential to win — and keep — support from the governor.”
That ignores evidence buried in the very
same Times story, in the tale of Vermont governor Pete
Shumlin.
In 2011, the Times notes,
Shumlin made Vermont the first state in the nation to approve single-payer
health care. “But he abandoned the effort in 2014 amid growing concerns about
tax increases and runaway healthcare costs,” the reporter notes.
Abandoned?! Yes. Having won on
single-payer in Montpelier, Shumlin was confronted by angry Vermont taxpayers
outside the capitol — and he swiftly ditched/deserted/renounced the state
takeover. As Shumlin told the Times reporter, “There isn’t a
political party in the world that’s going to raise their hands every year to
increase taxes on hard-working citizens. That’s the big mistake I made in
Vermont.”
Did California’s government unions and
their national allies learn from Shumlin’s big mistake? They did not.
“Progressive dreams for single-payer care
didn’t die when Vermont retreated,” the Times reporter tells
us. Instead, progressives doubled down, and “‘Medicare for All’ became a
liberal rallying cry for Democrats nationally when Vermont senator Bernie
Sanders stumped for it during his presidential campaigns.”
There’s a lesson for ordinary Americans in
Hart’s Los Angeles Times story. First, progressives wouldn’t
know reality if it slapped them in the face. Second, progressives across the
nation routinely exploit California’s political dysfunction to advance the
national progressive agenda. With our cash-rich government unions in near-total
control of every statewide office and the legislature, progressive causes attract
activists from all over America. Single-payer brought them from Washington,
Oregon, Colorado, New York, and Illinois, drawn by a common strategic vision:
They would leverage the brokenness of California to create a model
government-run health-care system. That success would metastasize, spreading
single-payer from the nation’s most powerful state to Olympia, Salem, Denver,
Albany, and Springfield, and then into Washington, D.C., itself.
The battle for California, you see, is a
battle for America.
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