Newsom Can’t Memory-Hole What He Did to California – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Last year, California, to great fanfare, became the first state to fund free health care for all its illegal immigrants — which totals about 1.8 million people.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom framed the policy as a great moral achievement. “Through this expansion,” he said, “we’re making sure families and communities across California are healthier, stronger, and able to get the care they need when they need it.”

There was just one problem. When Newsom rolled out the policy, California was facing years of budget deficits amounting to a shortfall of tens of billions of dollars, according to the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Despite the budget holes — which Newsom patched with accounting maneuvers and withdrawals from the state’s rainy-day fund — California liberals were adamant that the health care policy was a moral necessity. For instance, California state Senator Maria Elena Durazo called the policy a “historic investment” that “speaks to California’s commitment to health care as a human right.”

Well, who could have guessed it, but it turns out California could not actually afford universal free health care for illegal immigrants. The policy cost billions more than anticipated and spiraled California into an even bigger deficit hole.

So last week, Newsom proposed as part of his May budget revision that the state freeze the enrollment of illegal immigrants in the state’s Medicaid system beginning next year and that the state begin charging illegal immigrants — in two years’ time — $100 a month to stay in the program. Free dental care for illegal immigrants would also be rolled back.

It was an admission that the free-health-care-for-illegal-immigrants policy had been fiscally untenable — and a stunning admission at that, given the extent to which Newsom’s administration had trumpeted the policy as an achievement that should lead the rest of the country to follow its moral bravery.

Newsom Tries to Evade Responsibility

Yet Newsom tried to deflect responsibility for this entirely self-inflicted disaster. He repeatedly claimed that President Donald Trump’s tariffs were to blame for California’s (structural and long-term) deficits. California faced, he said, a “$16 billion Trump Slump.” Never mind that the Legislative Analyst’s Office has, since last year, estimated that California will shortly face annual deficits in the amount of $20 billion, or that Republicans repeatedly warned that California could not afford the Medicaid expansion.

But Newsom isn’t just trying to deflect responsibility for the fiscal disaster he has inflicted on California through sheer irresponsibility. He is also trying to distort the kind of governor he has been. Throughout the six and a half years he has reigned as governor, he has been on a one-man mission to cross off as many items as possible on the progressive laundry list of far-fetched dreams. Now that he realizes this is not the best way to win the presidency, he wants to pretend otherwise. (RELATED: Gavin Goes ‘Soul-Searching’)

And yet, even as Newsom backs away from the most prominently radical of his progressive policies, he maintains the program in broad strokes and sustains his policy of approaching the fiscal cliff by proposing $322 billion in spending. He continues to patch over the state’s structural fiscal problems by pulling $7.1 billion from the state’s rainy-day fund, using loans, and, again, deploying accounting maneuvers. The real, unaddressed problem is that outflows have become larger than inflows under his leadership.

It’s also not clear that Newsom will find any success in pulling back the Medicaid benefits for illegal immigrants that he so foolishly provided. The reaction from California Democrats has been swift and angry. Former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra, who is running to replace Newsom, said, “I will tell you, the last place I want to go is backwards when it comes to giving people access to the health care they need.”

Newsom’s never-ending spending will inevitably leave Californians facing fiscal disaster and higher taxes when he leaves the governorship in 2027. And that will be impossible to hide. When Newsom runs for president, he will be dogged by the wreckage he left in California.

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