As I’m sure all of us at DailyKos know, Healthy California, the proposal to turn the Golden State into a single-payer system, has been be shelved due to lack of financing and excessive cost of the program. Regardless of whether one believes in a single-payer system or that the cost was deliberately over-inflated, the bottom-line is that it’s done. So the question is, now what?
And as far as I’m concerned the answer is: Start again.
However, this time CA should eschew the single-payer model. I know, I know, for a progressive to say that is to just begging to be labelled as not a “true believer,” as a “detriment to the cause,” as, of all horrible things, a “centrist.” The truth of the matter is, while California could go single-payer one day, this decade is not that day. That doesn’t mean we can’t start the process though.
So how should California approach curbing healthcare costs? By being what we are as a state: a melting pot. Healthy California failed, but had some excellent ideas. The same can be said for the Medicare for All proposal in Congress. And then there’s other states like Nevada, tackling the healthcare issue in their own ways.
And California? Can use all of these to start the journey in becoming a single-payer state.
