They have tried, but the aforementioned political party blocked such efforts at the state level in the past, and currently federal law (again, due to that same political party) requires the state to get permission from the federal government to implement a single-payer healthcare system.
However, as currently envisioned, the single-payer system would not charge employers; it would be part of the taxes levied on all taxpayers (including employers), which would spread out the costs more.
It's pretty clear that the opinionists didn't actually read the studies they linked to, since at least one of the studies they cited to claim that single-payer would increase costs actually said single-payer would do the opposite, to the tune of a more than 8% reduction of 2017 amounts, which was before a number of health insurers jacked up their premiums just because they could. https://www.peri.umass.edu/media/k2/attachments/PollinZetZal...
The biggest factor encouraging Californians to move out of state is high cost of housing, not the higher taxes.
For example on a household income of $100,000 with members married filing jointly, California effective state income tax rate is about 3%, or in this case $3,000.
Moving to a zero state income tax state like Washington or Texas will only save you that much in state taxes but will probably save you a huge amount more in lower housing costs - for a common single-family home perhaps on the order of 20 to $30,000 a year.
If you want to place blame anywhere, place it on restrictive zoning laws that limit the construction of new housing, and on proposition 13 which has disincentivized the building of residential real estate in favor of commercial, and allowed untold numbers of properties to multiply and value over the decades without paying anything near an equivalent increase in property taxes.
Lord have mercy on anyone trying to explain this to angry boomer parents that live in Orange County (mine generally included).
The reason your kids cant buy a house down the street from yours has nothing to do with how much taxes your kids pay and everything to do with the policies that you've voted for over a lifetime of homeownership that have insured way less supply than demand.
These people _love_ to talk about how much more their houses are worth at dinner parties everytime you see them and then are all surprised pikachu face when they've priced out their own kids.
Housing can be affordable or an investment, but not both.
Most of the people leaving CA were of the far-right political persuasion, so good riddance to them. And generally, CA is already overpopulated for the amount of housing currently available (or constructable within the near future), so having fewer people actually relieves a lot of the overusage issues currently plaguing many of the public services in CA.
With specific respect to the tax issue, the flipside of "one more tax" to pay for a single-payer system is that it would replace health insurance premiums. Because premiums are currently set for smaller risk sharing pools than a statewide pool of nearly 40 million, and those premiums must also include significant profit margins to pay for health executive's multimillion dollar annual bonuses, it would be very easy for a single-payer tax levy to undercut premiums by more than 50% (and for the single-payer proposals currently under consideration, the employee savings range from 50-90%).
If anything, the problem with a tax for a single-payer health system is that people would be saving so much money compared to paying health insurance premiums that CA would have too many people moving into the state for the rest of our public services to handle.
>> Suffice to say CA has some of the highest taxes of any state, yet it also has some of the worst social problems - poverty, homelessness, etc.
I was under the impression that much of the homelessness problem is because CA is a nice place to live (with or without a home) and because the climate is temperate and thus safer to live than most other places (where a homeless person could literally freeze to death.)
Sorry if this sounds insensitive -- I really want to understand this: I concede that cost of housing could lead to homelessness, but I dont understand this -- isnt the housing cost really a problem just in the two major metro areas? Is housing exorbitant once you leave those areas? For someone who is homeless, is there any gravity anymore to -- say -- being close to SF/SV/Hollywood?
You're right on both counts. CA has a big homeless problem because of the weather, and other states exploit that to use CA as a dumping ground for their own homeless.
LA Times' Steve Lopez interviewed a number of homeless last year in a series of articles. Most of them weren't from LA. They just came because they were told the weather was great and that drugs in LA were free.
CA is a huge state, and while the big cities are mostly liberal, the rural parts of the state are very conservative. Nixon and Reagan hail from Southern California, and up until fairly recently, Orange County and the Inland Empire were more conservative than the Southeast.
A number of far right groups can trace their origins to the Inland Empire or to CA's far North.
As for the homeless issues: multiple states admit that they use CA as their dumping grounds for their homeless. It was, and still is, the unofficial policy of the state of Texas to buy their homeless tickets to LA. (Former TX governor Rick Perry used to openly brag about this, including when he was running for president.) A recent survey conducted by the LA Times last year found that more than half of LA's homeless aren't even from California. They just came here because authorities back home suggested that they would enjoy CA more. Excluding the non-local homeless, LA would have enough beds to house its own homeless. We just don't have enough to house the entire country's homeless as well.
I keep hearing that most of the homeless in SF are actually from SF.
As of 2015, approximately 71% of the city's homeless had housing in the city before becoming homeless, while the remaining 29% came from outside of San Francisco. This figure is up from 61% in 2013.[1]
The current solution is also a tax, just in a different form.
A broader solution would not be one-more-tax, it would be net-zero. The current proposal is also a tax -- it forces a cost on Uber (which will be passed onto customers) to solve the problem on a micro level. Whether I pay an "Uber regulatory recovery fee" or some other tax is all net zero. But I'd love to see a broader solution that solves the problem more universally (if not at the federal level, then at least at the state level).
However, as currently envisioned, the single-payer system would not charge employers; it would be part of the taxes levied on all taxpayers (including employers), which would spread out the costs more.