Your comment is misleading at best, most likely incorrect. and it will definitely be a tax. It will not be “balanced,” I mean like not even close. CA needs to double the size of its budget to do this, and then devote every cent of tax revenue towards single payer (no more public schools!) even after assuming all current copays, premiums, and employer contributions would now be directed towards funding single payer in CA. Hundreds of billions of dollars in additional funding over what we already spend on healthcare.

Big fan of single payer and in the long term it would be worth it, but we have to balance the state budget annually, constitutionally. people pushing for it at the state level are naive or uneducated on this topic, or are trying to virtue signal knowing damn well this is just unfortunately not feasible on multiple fronts for the time being. We can bitch about “big pharma” all we want like this article does, but Single payer health care will likely need to be figured out at the national level.