California’s government unions have learned the wrong lessons from their attempted takeover of state health care.
California’s government unions have learned the wrong lessons from their attempted takeover of state health care.
E 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.