Newsom: On Second Thought, We Can’t Afford Free Medical Coverage For Illegals

Second thoughts, eh? They’re very useful … when pandering politicians sense that the winds have changed. And they are all the more remarkable when first thoughts should have sufficed to deduce the obvious. 

Case in point: Gavin Newsom, who has run California into the ground in every way imaginable, but especially on fiscal stability. Despite years of budget crises created by foolish spending and self-imposed drags on economic growth, Newsom and the state legislature decided to give illegal aliens access to free Medicaid coverage. Newsom insisted that the move would save Californians money by allowing illegal immigrants to see doctors rather than wait for ER visits, an argument used and proven false in the ObamaCare debate a decade earlier. 

And it got proven false again in California. Two months ago, California reported a massive Medi-Cal shortfall less than a year after Newsom’s expansion, and three guesses why:

California faces a $6.2 billion budget gap in the state’s Medicaid services, which could force Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic lawmakers to reevaluate future coverage for some of the 15 million people who receive health care through the program, including immigrants.

The shortfall comes a year after California launched an ambitious coverage expansion to provide free health care to all low-income adults regardless of their immigration status. That’s costing far more than the state projected.

At that time, Newsom refused to abandon his pet project. Now the Associated Press reports that Newsom has had a change of heart and may suspend enrollments of any more illegal aliens. Is Greasy Gavin finally taking responsibility for his incompetent governance? Not exactly. The AP reports that Newsom will claim that the financial problems were the fault of … guess who?  Oh, let’s not always see the same hands:

Gov. Gavin Newsom wants California to stop enrolling more low-income immigrants without legal status in a state-funded health care program starting in 2026 and begin charging those already enrolled a monthly premium the following year.

The decision is driven by a higher-than-expected price tag on the program and economic uncertainty from federal tariff policies, Newsom said in a Wednesday announcement. The Democratic governor’s move highlights Newsom’s struggle to protect his liberal policy priorities amid budget challenges in his final years on the job. …

Newsom is expected to blame President Donald Trump’s tariff policies for the shortfalls, estimating that the polices have cost the state $16 billion in tax revenues. California is also bracing for major budget hits if Republicans in Congress follow through with a plan to slash billions of dollars in Medicaid and penalize states for providing health care to immigrants without legal status.

Ahem. The tariffs came into effect six weeks ago and are now mainly paused for negotiations. Did Medi-Cal lose $6.2 billion over the preceding fiscal year in anticipation of Trump’s tariffs? How exactly would tariffs impact the state’s health-care welfare system anyway? It’s not as if California imports its health-care services from tariff-impacted nations like Mexico, Canada, or China. Tariffs might explain overall budget shortfalls if they impact economic activity, but we haven’t seen evidence of that yet, except in the massive front-loading of imports in Q1 that anticipated high tariff rates in Q2. Absent that import spike, annualized GDP in Q1 would likely have hit 4% or higher. And that import shift wouldn’t negatively impact state budgets at all.

The shortfall resulted from Newsom’s decisions, not Trump’s. Trump wasn’t even in office when most of those losses took place. Newsom wanted to pander to progressives and virtue-signal on immigration in support of Joe Biden’s open-borders policies and stick California taxpayers with the bill. 

Only now, Newsom has realized two points. The first is that his claims that giving away free coverage means actually footing the costs of health care in both clinics and ERs. The second is that the American public — presumably including Californians — despised Biden’s open-borders policies. They don’t want to foot the bill for medical care to illegal immigrants; they want them gone:

Why does this matter so much more to Newsom now? Greasy Gavin wants to run for president in the next cycle, as David noted on Monday — and he wants to claim the center in a Democrat primary. (I assume they’ll have a real primary in 2028, for a change.) That’s why Newsom needs to shift positions on immigration policies and attempt to shift blame at the same time for his massively incompetent decisions. The chart above from last month’s Havard-Harris CAPS poll is also why Newsom suddenly considers male encroachment on female spaces and competition to be “deeply unfair,” while taking care to do absolutely nothing about it in California. 

In other words, Newsom is positioning himself to be Joe Biden, only with a functioning frontal cortex. He’s an untrustworthy bungler, but at least Newsom isn’t suffering from dementia! He’s just suffering from his usual chronic afflictions — incompetence combined with a refusal to take responsibility for his own failures.