In 2025 alone, the six richest men in the country (and world) became $476 billion richer. During that year, the Trump regime cut back Medicaid — the federal medical assistance program relied on by over seventy million Americans, including four out of ten children — in order to bankroll lowering taxes for the rich. The bulk of the cuts are expected to hit Medicaid programs following the 2026 midterm elections, and they will hit ordinary Americans hard. Donald Trump’s 2025 One Big Beautiful Bill Act will raise out-of-pocket costs dramatically and kick millions of people off insurance, many of them children, as well as nearly a third of young people between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four.
For California’s state medical assistance program, Medi-Cal, federal cuts are expected to drain $100 million over the next five years, potentially collapsing the state’s health care system. That means millions of people losing coverage and families needing to make hideous choices between food, housing, and medicine, as so many are already forced to. It means hospitals and clinics closing and tens of thousands of health care jobs evaporating. For a state already struggling with vast inequality and a homelessness crisis, it would have a catastrophic impact.
Fun fact: there are 214 billionaires residing in California worth a collective $2 trillion. If you carved out just 5 percent of that hoarded wealth for public use, you could fill the Medi-Cal gap and fund the state’s health care system. That’s precisely what a proposed ballot initiative aims to do.
The California Billionaire Tax Act is the first serious foray into a proper wealth tax. It was launched by United Healthcare Workers West (UHW), a local of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) representing over 120,000 hospital and health care workers across the state, along with progressive economists Emmanuel Saez and Robert Reich.
For years, UHW has been at the forefront of experimenting with ballot…
Auteur: Ben Case
