Philp: Will Newsom keep health coverage for immigrants in California?

In California an estimated million residents or about of the population are immigrants without legal permission to live in the country They perform various jobs native residents would never do The financial challenge facing Sacramento is that these immigrants also comprise nearly a quarter of the state general fund cost of wellbeing care via California s effort for low-income residents Medi-Cal The state has made steady progress over the last nine years to provide Medi-Cal coverage to more and more of this population In all these residents became eligible for Medi-Cal This is a signature achievement for Gov Gavin Newsom and legislative Democrats But it may be short-lived An explosion in Medi-Cal costs is now testing this undertaking to its limits as President Donald Trump and the Republican-led Congress have yet to make huge budget trims necessary to partially pay for an expected cut in taxes Cuts to the federal Medicaid scheme known as Medi-Cal in the state are a near certainty Here in Sacramento where lawmakers are a couple months away from facing their budget deadline for the - fiscal year something is about to give It s impossible to know at this point just who could be impacted Kristof Stremikis director of domain analysis and insight for the California Wellness Care Foundation advised The Bee What is clear is that reducing revenue requires covering fewer people reducing benefits or paying healthcare care providers less Sacramento s Republican delegation has been seizing on this run-up in Medi-Cal costs and blaming it on the Democrats decision to cover the immigrants who lack legal permission Analysts point to a number of factors High costs But there is no getting around the disproportionate cost of covering these residents to the state That is because the federal regime which provides more than of the overall money for this venture does not cover immigrants in the country illegally California has stepped in to pay these costs with its own money In health-speak these Californians have an unsatisfactory immigration status Medi-Cal is bleeding so much money that the Newsom administration has had to seek an immediate infusion of more than billion merely to pay the bills for this fiscal year Michelle Baass director of the California Department of Healthcare Services in the past few days stated legislators that rising costs are due to higher-than-anticipated enrollment including the undocumented population and increased pharmacy costs The total scheme is estimated to cost more than billion to cover about million Californians about billion coming from the state general fund The robustness coverage of immigrants lack legal status does not feel like a winning wedge issue for California s Republican leadership Polls have shown that more than advocacy this coverage with that percentage rising over time Its popularity undoubtedly will not be lost on the governor as he is on an uncharted political journey away from the toxic Democrat brand as he takes new positions such as opposing transgender females in athletic competition Newsom exclusively can t run away from himself He was the candidate for governor who promised universal fitness care for all Californians through a centralized single-payer system Wellbeing care is such a core value no podcast from Marin County could hope to change that Too profitable Medi-Cal s financial obstacle is due to its popularity namely more Californians signed up for it this year than expected It s very demanding to project what the caseload level is going to be revealed Jason Constantouros a principal fiscal and program analyst for the California Legislative Analyst s Office the Legislature s nonpartisan think tank Related Articles Various older AAPI adults are foreign-born They re tough on immigration too a new poll finds Students protest as University of California campuses reports visas revoked for particular international students Frontier Patrol noted it targeted known criminals in one California county But it had no record on of arrestees Internal Revenue Institution agrees to send immigrant tax figures to ICE for enforcement Trump administration cancels at least nine more novice visas in Bay Area If there is a single population to blame for the run-up in Medi-Cal costs it may be seniors California has been particularly generous in allowing low-income seniors with considerable assets to still qualify for the effort Constantouros declared That s yet another population that may be a target for cuts Eliminating Medi-Cal coverage for any Californian won t make soundness care costs go away It will shift scheduled physiological visits in offices to emergency rooms where hospitals by law must provide that care regardless of insurance And one way or another a lot of those costs get passed onto the same taxpaying consumers Undocumented immigrants don t deserve a target on their backs this budget season any more than the rest of the state s residents Personally I d prefer that state dollars go to wellbeing care than to rebates for electric vehicles as promised by the governor if Trump ends the federal activity But this feels like the majority unpredictable budget season facing Sacramento in a long time The new drop in the stock domain caused by Trump s spiking of tariffs across the globe only makes the revenue side of the ledger even bleaker in Sacramento It s going to test the fiscal values of Democrats and what they stand for majority of Tom Philp is a columnist for the Sacramento Bee The Sacramento Bee Distributed by Tribune Content Agency