A Pile of Bitter Ironies: Candidate Newsom and Medicaid

The state of California has long provided Medi-Cal (its name for Medicaid) to undocumented immigrants, which the federal government does not. Recently, a problem appeared. Last summer the Trump regime enacted a new requirement: you must document 80 hours of employment per month in order to get federally covered Medicaid health care.

California governor Gavin Newsom had to decide: impose the same requirement on undocumented immigrants who get Medi-Cal, or not. If imposed, undocumented immigrants would face the particularly onerous task of proving they meet the employment requirement, since they must often work for cash and outside the Social Security system. If not imposed, citizen recipients of Medi-Cal would have to satisfy a work requirement while undocumented immigrants would not.

Newsom, an all but official 2028 presidential aspirant, tucked the same employment requirement on undocumented immigrants into state law.

What a knotted tangle! Newsom abandoned single payer health care several years ago. (It was only state-based single payer.) Now his remaining claim to be progressive – Medicaid for all poor people in the state – is caught in a vise. Like every “serious” Democratic candidate for president, Newsom won’t go near national Medicare for All.

Some 1.7 million undocumented immigrants who pick California’s fruit and vegetable crops, who prepare and deliver meals, and who are nannies for children of the well-to-do are about to lose even the miserable health care they previously got by waiting for hours in understaffed clinics.

Communists do not oppose reforms flat out. We do oppose reformism, the insistence that the working class confine its political action to extracting one reform after another from the capitalist class. When you look at Gavin Newsom and Medi-Cal, reformism again proves to be a farce. Revolution, challenging as it is, is the only way out.

We need a communist party that agitates, educates, and organizes for the socialist-communist road. The most visionary goal is the most practical one.

Charles Andrews is the author of The Hollow Colossus and other books.

A list of his occasional essays is at http://www.hollowcolossus.com/moreCA.htm