The number of Californians without health insurance could nearly double by 2030, according to a new report from the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
The report projects that 2.2 million additional Californians under 65 years old will lose health insurance by 2030, reaching a total of 4.6 million uninsured state residents. The uninsured rate will rise to nearly 14.7%, the report also estimates.
The report modeled changes to Medi-Cal, California’s Medicaid program, and Covered California, the state’s health insurance marketplace. Some of these changes come from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s 2025-2026 Budget Act, such as an enrollment freeze for undocumented Medi-Cal enrollees 19 years old and over. Other changes come from the federal One Big Beautiful Bill Act, such as the elimination of federal full-scope Medicaid for refugees, asylees and other humanitarian immigrants.
Some of the policies, such as the Medi-Cal enrollment freeze, were already implemented this year. Others won’t be implemented until as late as July 2027.
“If you vote on a policy that has an outcome that hurts people, and you’re up for reelection in between when you voted for it and when the impacts are really felt, I think it’s super important to show people, ‘this is what’s going to happen in your community because of the way that these folks voted,’” said Miranda Dietz, co-author of the report who serves as the director of the Health Care Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center. “That should be a part of how our democracy works.”
To forecast the effects of these changes, researchers used the California Simulation of Insurance Markets, a micro-simulation model designed to estimate how federal and state policies will impact California residents’ decisions to obtain insurance coverage and employers’ decisions to offer coverage. The UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research created the model in 2012 and originally used it to estimate the impact of the Affordable Care Act.
In the report, researchers noted that state and federal healthcare insurance policy changes made in 2025 will “erode much of the progress” California has made to increase coverage since the ACA and subsequent state actions. The report adds that these changes will “widen disparities” in healthcare coverage and particularly affect low-income, Latine and undocumented Californians who already face higher uninsured rates than the state average.
“I hope this helps to show just how deep these cuts would be and how much they would reverse a lot of the progress that this state has made in bringing down our uninsured rate and in covering people,” Dietz said. “I hope it’ll help people realize what an important investment it is in Californians to provide health insurance.”