California’s single-payer healthcare effort is dead. Why it isn’t going away
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — There’s no bigger litmus test in the California Democratic Party than where a politician stands on single-payer healthcare.
But the anemic performance and unspectacular demise last week of another bill to launch the model in the Golden State shows that may be all it is.
Bogged down by political tension and unanswered questions about its enormous price tag, legislation to guarantee medical coverage to every resident by levying billions in new taxes died in the Assembly without a floor vote.
“AB 1400 was an exercise in abstract morality,” William Hsiao, an emeritus professor of economics at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said of the failed legislation. “It’s a dream plan. If you want to put out a plan that has a realistic chance at passage and serious consideration, you have to have serious cost estimates.”
Still, the debate over single-payer in California isn’t going away — even if bills go nowhere at all.
For decades, Democrats at the state Capitol have tried and failed to transition single-payer from a widely shared ideology that every person deserves affordable care to a policy that would replace what many
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