Source: State Affairs
Assembly leaders on Thursday gave a preview of the dire conversations on health care and the state budget awaiting lawmakers in the new year.
“As we prepare here in a couple weeks to return to our legislative duties and begin the second year of this two-year session in Sacramento, Californians should be very alarmed about health care,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, said at a press event in Los Angeles.
Rivas, Assemblymember Jessica Caloza, D-Los Angeles, and Assembly Health Committee Chair Mia Bonta, D-Oakland, met with local leaders in health care to hear how best the Legislature can address the impending crisis caused by federal funding cuts.
“Half of our state’s children rely on Medi-Cal, a program that the Trump administration has actively sought to dismantle,” Rivas said.
Rivas also said Congress appears likely to allow insurance premium subsidies to expire at the end of the year.
“It’s going to mean premiums are going to spike some 15 to 20 percent next year, we’re talking in a couple of weeks,” Rivas said. “It’s the biggest jump in decades, only exacerbating our affordability crisis in this state, which we have actively tried to tackle this past year.”
For Bonta, the Los Angeles visit was the sixth stop on her “Health of Health Care” statewide tour.
“We've been on a tour looking across the state of California at what, for our health care infrastructure and our providers, are the most important for us to be able to address right now, at this moment, as we go back into the legislative session,” Bonta said.
She said “nothing is more scary” than the situation posed by federal cuts, including cuts to Medi-Cal that were included in the July budget reconciliation bill.
“For Californians, that means $30 billion every single year is going to be ripped out of Medi-Cal and our system here,” Bonta said.
The cuts come as California faces its own budget shortfall — earlier this year the Legislature made its own cuts to Medi-Cal in order to fill the deficit. The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates there will be an $18 billion deficit in the coming year.
“It is not within the wherewithal of the state of California to fully fund Medi-Cal, and it's going to require us to make some very tough choices about what we are able to cover,” she said.
Bonta said lawmakers will focus on making the most out of the federal funding it does get.
“A lot of what we talked about in these forums was trying to figure out how to maximize every dollar that we should be getting from the federal government for Medi-Cal coverage,” she said.
She said she hopes to cap off the tour with an informational hearing in early February, pulling together what she learned from the stakeholders around the state.
“I’m also hopeful that we will be able to have a singular agenda in the state Legislature about what we need to do in order to be able to look, both from a budget perspective and a legislative perspective, at how we deal with this health crisis moment that we are in,” she said.
Have questions? Contact Emily Hamann at ehamann@stateaffairs.com or on X @emilychamann.