California single payer health-care bill meets economic reality

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Democrats' single-payer health-care dream just became a nightmare

• A new study by the California State Senate shows that single payer health care would cost more than the entire current state budget.
• That means everything else that Californians want from their government would have to take a backseat to health care.
• Hopefully, this report will start to make our national health care debate more economically realistic.

 

Jake Novak | @jakejakeny

Wednesday, 24 May 2017 | 2:23 PM ET

 

Maybe we should rename so-called single payer health care and call it "single slayer."

Because as the politicians in California just found out, providing government paid-for health care isn't just expensive, it's more expensive than everything else... combined.

That's what a new study done by California's state senate determined this week. Here are the very ugly numbers:

 

• The annual price tag for single payer health care in the Golden State would be a whopping $400 billion.
• The total amount of money allocated for the California state budgetfor the coming fiscal year is $179.5 billion
• TILT!

Okay, that "TILT!" part wasn't officially a mathematical or economic term. But you get the idea. Even with the $200 billion California currently gets from federal and other sources for its health costs, the state would still have to more than double its entire budget to cover the additional costs of providing universal health care.

The study tried to be a bit more optimistic, noting that private employers currently pay between $100 and $150 billion per year to provide health insurance for their workers and hypothesizing that money "could" be made available to the single payer plan. But that assumes those employers and employees would be okay with choosing a government-run option instead of their private insurance.

Yeah, none of that is going to work.

The good news is that this study wasn't conducted by some right wing or libertarian group, but the Democrat super majority controlled California state legislature. And that means the harsh realities of what it costs to provide this long-held dream of the liberal Democrats in America can finally start being debunked in favor of more workable options.

Let's stop here for a second and clarify something that's been lost in the eternally annoying debate about whether health care is a right or a privilege. The only human right connected to health care that isn't ruinous to all other rights and responsibilities is the right of an urgently injured or dying person to get emergency care, no questions initially asked.

Once that care is administered, the care givers and/or those who paid for the care have a right to ask for some kind of payment. This is a basic ethical truth that, thanks to the bean counters in Sacramento, now has even more economic truth to back it up.

Okay, let's get back to some other realities. We now have comprehensive proof that providing government paid health care would sacrifice all those other core rights that the left, right, and just about everyone in the middle believes in.

Let's start with K-12 and higher education, which California currently spends more than it does on health care according to the state's own itemized budget figures.

So we must ask: Is it worth it to sacrifice our children's education for single payer health care?

Read more at: http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/24/california-proves-single-payer-health-care-is-too-expensive-commentary.html

 

Wow, $400 billion. And this study was done by the California State Senate.

I think this article accurately points out the flaws in the health care debate. At what cost are we willing to provide government paid health care? Because we're likely going to have to sacrifice some other things, maybe even things that are important, in order just to cover the costs. At what point does a right give way to responsibility?

Do you think it's responsible for California to provide single payer health care that is going to cost double of what the entire California state budget currently costs?