43% of Californians Receive Medi-Cal at Cost of $152 Billion
Written by Chriss W. Street
Public Policy Institute of California found that 43 percent of Californians now receive taxpayer-funded Medi-Cal insurance coverage at a cost of $152 billion per year. The coverage includes four of ten new-born babies, three in seven children, two in nine non-senior adults, one in four seniors, and two in five people with disabilities.
Public health is one of California’s biggest businesses with U.S. taxpayers contributing three quarters of Medi-Cal annual cost, or $114 billion; and California taxpayers footing a quarter of the cost, or $37.5 billion.
Enrollment jumped by almost 4 million to about 17.7 million after March 2020, when EDD and Medi-Cal enrollment eligibility checks were suspended by the state, due to Covid-19. When California admitted to $33 billion of EDD fraud in May of 2023, the Medi-Cal eligibility checks were reinstated and over 1.6 million enrollees, or about one in ten Medi-Cal enrollees, have since been terminated.
There has been no State of California disclosure regarding the amount of total amount Medi-Cal fraud over the three year period, and the state’s liability and pay-back terms for approximately $115 billion of potential liability.
California in January 2024 instituted a new Medi-Cal expansion that makes undocumented immigrants eligible for Medi-Cal subsidies. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Department of Finance projects that the latest expansion of Medi-Cal will enroll an additional 698,000 adults ages 26 to 49 at a cost of $2.9 billion.
Gov. Newsom’s estimates for potential Medi-Cal enrollment growth appear to be substantially understated. California is home to 10.4 million immigrants—23% of the foreign-born population of the United States, and just 54 percent are now citizens.
The latest Pew Research Center in 2021 estimated that there were 1.85 million undocumented immigrants in California in 2021 projected. But the Biden Administration’s open-border policies caused record levels of undocumented immigration over the last three years. The actual number of undocumented California residents now eligible for Medi-Cal has more than doubled to about 3.5 million and the Medi-Cal expansion will more than double to about $6 billion.
