Bernie Sanders extremely disappointed by stalling of Californias single-payer health care bill

[haele]

77. Okay, here's the situation...

A lot of California's Single Payer bill was dependent on leveraging federal monies for Medicare/Medicaid and other federal grant programs to get it off the ground.
Covered California is a Medicaid expansion program. That means that over half of California's insured population is already enrolled in one form or another federal health care systems, which will need to be considered when setting up a state-wide system.
You don't want to double-tax people who are currently paying FICA and SS taxes on the federal level if you're going to be taking people off that federal program and putting them all on a state program separate from Medicare/Medicaid, VA, Tricare, Tribal Health, SCHIP, etc, etc, etc...
...you're going to need to incorporate that funding into your program to pay for those people who are going to now be covered by the state.
And after you know what you're going to be able to get, be it a percentage or a block grant, you're going to have to figure out how you're going to spread the remaining health care costs out amongst the public. VAT? Income Tax? Employer Taxes? Fees?
What about people who will need subsidies, because either they have no income or all their income goes to food and housing, and they can't afford premiums on top of that?

The U.S. Congress - both House and Senate - has made it pretty clear they want to get rid of Medicare/Medicaid over the next ten years, because in a "Free Market", income taxes and social Safety Nets are apparently evil because they destroy economic "equality and freedom". After all, in a "Free Society", everyone is free to make good choices as well as bad, and equal justice means that if you can't afford it, it's theft.

Haele