Pirate's Cove

I wonder where the People’s Republik Of California will do cuts? Will they start spending the money on actual American citizen residents of California, or cut elsewhere so they can keep helping illegals and fake asylum seekers?

Cost of undocumented healthcare in California is billions over estimates, pressuring Democrats to consider cuts

Gov. JB Pritzker proposed a $330-million budget cut last month to scale back an expansion of healthcare coverage for undocumented adult immigrants in Illinois, where a state audit found that services for certain age groups exceeded estimates by more than 280%.

California soon may face the same financial pressure to reduce coverage.

California became the first state in the nation to offer healthcare to all income-eligible immigrants one year ago, which gave Gov. Gavin Newsom another liberal achievement to tout when lauding the Golden State as a national trailblazer.

But the $9.5-billion price tag of California’s program is already more than $3 billion above the budget estimate from last summer and is expected to grow even higher. In Sacramento, the governor and Democrats in the state Legislature now are under pressure to reduce coverage to bring down costs during a budget crunch.

How many homeless could be helped with that currently $9.5 billion? How many many Americans in California could be helped by lowering their own health care costs? How about helping the lower income folks with food and aid? How about implementing constant measures to do things that reduce wildfires?

Obviously, with Trump and Elon Derangement Syndrome running rampant through the LA Times, they spend a bunch of paragraphs whining. Then

The scale of the funding reduction to Medicaid is still unknown and it’s impossible to project the severity of the cuts for California with any certainty. Republicans in the House have suggested cutting $880 billion across the federal government, a significant portion of which would have to come from Medicaid.

“If you pull $10 billion out of California healthcare annually, that’s a lot of dough and that’s going to have very serious impacts that would ripple across every sector of the healthcare delivery system from hospitals, physicians, home care, nursing homes and to services that millions depend on,” said David Panush, a healthcare policy consultant who worked in the state Capitol for decades, about potential federal cuts.

Well, don’t spend on illegals. Use it for American citizens in the PRC. Besides, how much of the cuts is simply removing fraud, waste, and abuse from the allocation? Where the money has to be used for the intended purpose, rather than being turned into a slush fund and such?

Absent federal cuts, California’s financial footing already was so shaky that Newsom proposed taking $7.1 billion from the state’s rainy day fund, which acts like a savings account to buffer the budget during an economic crisis, to cover the cost of state programs next year. DeMaio has argued the state wouldn’t need to break open its piggy bank if Democrats cut healthcare for undocumented immigrants.

It’s not actually raining: it’s more like you turned all the faucets on upstairs, stopped the sinks and tubs up, and then went to work, and are shocked that water is dropping down into the first floor. You did this.

Newsom grew the Medi-Cal coverage pool to include all income-eligible immigrants in California under a multiyear expansion by age categories that began in 2020 and concluded in 2024.

But the program has been plagued by cost overruns since it started.

“Cost overruns.” To the tune of $3.1 billion to help out illegals. How much is mismanagement and fraud, etc? How much is going into the pockets of NGOs, campaign donors, etc, and never helped? A slush fund? How about auditing the program? But, hey, Californian’s who voted Democrat need to not complain if the cuts hit themselves, or if taxes go up, because they voted for this.

ICE should not bother with California at this time. Clear the illegals out of states that voted for Trump, leave them in Blue states for the time being. Let them deal with the consequences of supporting unfettered illegal immigration.