Approximately 30% of our healthcare dollars currently go toward insurance. Efficient single payer healthcare systems are already here, such as Medicare (with a 2% administrative cost), the VA, and the Indian Health Service. Employers and workers are already paying insurance costs through our paychecks, and this would also go toward CalCare. We have substandard National health measures compared to other countries.
Several recent studies show how California could save BILLIONS, rather quickly. An April 2022 report by the Healthy California for All Commission concluded: “Under almost all scenarios analyzed, in the first year of implementation unified financing is expected to result in lower total health care expenditures than under the status quo; savings over time would be achieved under all scenarios examined, even when long-term care services and supports are included as covered services.”
Visit the CalCare, California Nurses Assoc., National Nurses United, or Medicare4All websites.
Sharon Paltin, M.D.,
Laytonville, CA
The SN&R interview with Sacramento City Senior Planner Greta Soos (June 2) addressed several challenges in the region’s housing affordability crisis: affordable housing is expensive to build, funding is limited, and local governments must be careful not to raise fees so high that they make new housing harder to produce.
That’s why I was concerned by her interest in the AB 130 Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) mitigation bank as a potential new funding source for affordable housing. Sacramento needs more affordable housing and the need far exceeds available subsidy dollars. But not every funding source is a solution.
We can’t keep treating new market-rate housing as an ATM. Every new fee gets embedded in the price of a home and the feasibility of a project. Fees imposed on a new home already average $109,000. VMT fees would likely add another $25,000 per home — and nearly $62,000 in areas like Natomas. Those costs are borne by homebuyers.
Housing affordability is already past the breaking point. Locally, every $1,000 increase in the price of a home pushes 575 families out of the market. Adding a VMT fee would mean that thousands of families would fail to qualify for a market-rate home, forcing them to seek – you guessed it – an affordable housing option.