California - Land of Milk and Honey Has Become A Lost Cause - Sour and Bitter!

 

California’s latest plan for illegal aliens will cost it a lot of money

By Andrea Widburg www.americanthinker.com

California is a wealthy state because of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. California is also the state with the highest poverty rate in America. Many of those living in poverty are illegal aliens, people who shouldn’t be in this country in the first place. Nevertheless, California’s Democrats have a soft spot for a group they envision as future Democrat party voters. So it is that, last week, California became the first state not only to guarantee free health care for all low-income immigrants but also to ensure that this promise extends to illegal aliens. This won’t help the state’s financial situation but will help it vis-à-vis federal rights and benefits.

For the time being, the federal government will not provide Medicaid to illegal aliens. California is about to change that policy within its borders for the estimated 2.5 million or more illegal aliens (plus their ~900,000 U.S.-born anchor babies) who live there. California has long offered Medi-Cal to the approximately 200,000 illegal aliens aged under 26 years. Still, this latest expansion is a big deal in terms of placing demands on taxpayer monies, something that even the Associated Press admits:

About 92% of Californians currently have some form of health insurance, putting the state in the middle of the pack nationally. But that will change once this budget is fully implemented, as adults living in the country illegally make up one of the largest groups of people without insurance in the state.

“This will represent the biggest expansion of coverage in the nation since the start of the Affordable Care Act in 2014,” said Anthony Wright, executive director of Health Access California, a statewide consumer health care advocacy group.

This free health care will be on top of the other benefits California extends to those who enter the country illegally. It has long refused to cooperate with ICE, even when it comes to violent illegal aliens. Illegal aliens have full access to public education in California, including admission to its colleges and universities (with financial aid). In addition, a proposed bill in California would extend unemployment benefits to illegal aliens, who are estimated to make up 1 in 16 workers in the state. And of course, there’s just the general cost of their being in America: They use public services (transportation, utilities, garbage, water, etc.) and have a big impact on the criminal justice system.

But with all those expenses, California has decided it’s still not enough, so free health care is now on tap for those whose first act upon entering America is to break our laws—and who are draining an economic system to which they’ve contributed nothing.

The AP sees problems ahead...for the illegal aliens who aren’t savvy enough to jump on this money train:

California’s expansion of Medicaid won’t be easy. A confluence of events, including the state’s slow rollout of the expansion and the end of some federal pandemic policies, mean about 40,000 low-income immigrants will likely lose their health coverage for up to a year in 2023 before being eligible to get it back — illustrating the difficulty of navigating the government-run health insurance system that is supposed to make it easier for people to get coverage.

I’ll spare you the sob story about the poor illegal immigrant who works to bring in more illegal aliens and is having trouble getting her free healthcare.

I’m glad I no longer live in California and, frankly, wouldn’t mind seeing it sink under the weight of its leftist policies (although I’m terribly sorry for the conservatives who are trapped there for family or economic reasons). However, the coming economic disaster I foresee from these policies doesn’t mean California won’t continue to have a disproportionate reach into federal power and the federal purse.

Over the past few years, California has (for the first time) suffered a net population loss:

Many in the state’s media and political establishment insist that the demographic decline is a “myth” concocted by red-state haters. It’s not. The state that attracted America’s domestic migrants through the 20th century is losing millions of them in the 21st century.

A declining population means fewer federal dollars and a smaller contingent in the House and the Electoral College. However, the one thing that will be a roaring success with the new Medi-Cal plan is that it will be a magnet for bringing in ever greater numbers of illegal aliens into the state. Because illegal aliens are counted in a state’s population for the above-listed federal purposes (a count helped along by a rigged census that overcounted blue state populations and undercounted red state populations), the policies aimed at keeping the illegal aliens arriving help maintain California’s status in the federal system.