Experts who spoke to Newsweek suggested that the plan brought before the California State Assembly was a step too far and indicated the limitations of liberal ambitions.
Assemblyman Ash Kalra, who wrote the bill, decided not to force a vote on the matter when it became clear there was not enough support for it in the Democrat-controlled state assembly.
Democrats control 50 of the assembly’s 80 seats and 41 votes were needed to keep the legislation alive.
The bill would have created the first universal health care system in the U.S. and legislative analysis showed that the system would cost between $314 billion and $391 billion in federal and state funds.
Thomas Gift, founding director of University College London’s Centre on U.S. Politics, told Newsweek that the assembly’s failure was a warning sign for Democrats who supported similar proposals.
“The California legislature’s failure to bring the universal health care bill to a vote is a wake-up call for Democrats, including in Washington: It shows just how far the country is from adopting a socialized health insurance program.” Gift said.
“If universal healthcare can’t get off the ground in California — one of the most liberal of states — it’s not going to fly in the nation as a whole,” he said.
“Regardless of its merits, and regardless of how many times progressives tell themselves that America should adopt a European-style welfare state, anything that smacks of socialized healthcare remains a hard sell among the U.S. public,” he added.
Paul Quirk, a political scientist at the University of British Columbia in Canada, told Newsweek that local factors played a key role in the failure of the California bill.
“This development is mostly about the situation of California, rather than national trends,” Quirk said.
“Establishing universal health care at the state level was a bridge too far, even for many California liberals,” he said. “The state already has some of the most severe fiscal challenges in the country, dealing with homelessness, opioids, fires, floods, COVID-19, job losses, crime.”
Quirk said California “has been losing businesses and middle-class residents, who pay most of the bills, to other states with lower taxes, especially Texas.”
“The idea that this is the time to add a major new spending program in California would have been a stretch regardless of any national opinion trends,” he said.
Assemblyman Kalra introduced another bill this year in order to fund the establishment of the universal health care system — Assembly Constitutional Amendment 11. That bill would have raised $163 billion in new taxes on businesses, large companies and the state’s wealthiest people.
Quirk said that state governments had to worry about “state taxes driving business and residents to other states” and so relied on the federal government for most funding for redistributive programs.
“That’s why no state has universal health care and only two — Vermont and Massachusetts - have come close,” he said.
The future of universal health care in the U.S. remains uncertain but for now the California effort is at an end.
