Obamacare and California

On Sunday evening, two days after Obamacare was passed, I came down with food poisoning. So far, Obamacare hasn’t helped me at all. What happened? Wasn’t The One supposed to cure all our ailments?

Seriously, Obamacare is going to hit California’s budget, chronically in the red, with another $2 billion in costs. BusinessWeek reports:

For California, with a $20 billion budget deficit, the extra load will cost at least an additional $2 billion to $3 billion annually, said Douglas, chief deputy director for California’s health care programs. He said the overhaul is currently projected to add 1.6 million people to the 7 million enrolled in his state’s program.

“We face enormous challenges just sustaining our existing program,” said Douglas in a March 18 telephone interview. “I just don’t see states having the capacity to move forward on these changes in this environment.”

The numbers of new enrollees because of the overhaul are based on current estimates and may be low, he said in an e-mail. The estimate doesn’t incorporate the growth that the program, known in California as Medi-Cal, may experience even without the new federal legislation, he said.

Medi-Cal recipients are projected to increase 4.3 percent to 7.3 million in fiscal 2011, which begins July 1, spokesman Norman Williams said.

And that’s just for starters. Like Medicare and Medicaid, Obamacare will skyrocket in costs.

And any new socialist program — Social Security in 1935, Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-1960s — costs so much it causes a recession. SS made the Great Depression greater. Medicare and Medicaid, by the time Nixon got done funding them, in the 1970s were a major cause of the “malaise” economy of “stagflation” (stagnation and inflation).

So the national economy isn’t going to recover. Which means the state economy isn’t going to recover. Which means the state budget deficits are only going to get worse.

— John Seiler