Homeless Population Grows While CA Governor Pushes Single Payer Health Care

California’s largest cities are reporting growing numbers of homeless, drug addicted and mentally-ill transients living on the streets, while Gov. Gavin Newsom is pushing his plan for single-payer “health care for all.” And, with approval from the governor, the California Legislature voted recently to tax California citizens who do not buy health insurance. This penalty revenue will be used to fund health insurance subsidies to encourage more people to purchase health insurance, and to provide health care to illegal immigrants.

“At a time when leaders in Washington attack health care and seek to undermine the Affordable Care Act, California is going in the opposite direction. In his first act as Governor, Newsom laid out a series of major, nation-leading proposals to lower prescription drug and health care costs for all California families and move California closer to the goal of health care for all,” Gov. Newsom’s press statement said. “And last month, the Legislature passed and the Governor signed the 2019-2020 state budget that made good on those ideas.”

Newsom will be visiting the Sacramento Native American Health Center on J. Street in Sacramento on Tuesday, and will likely be stepping over passed out bodies and dodging human excrement and used needles as he enters the facility.

San Francisco reports a growth of more than 30 percent in homeless street people since 2017. Sacramento boasts a growth of 19 percent in the most recent “Point-In-Time” count of the city’s homeless population. Point-in-time homeless counts are mandated every two years by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and impact the federal funds going to the state and counties.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg said he and the Sacramento City Council have allocated $100 million out of the Measure U funding for the homeless. But originally Steinberg said that $100 million would be spent to build affordable housing, California Globe recently reported.

Residents of California’s largest cities are experiencing huge homeless populations with derelict RVs with raw sewage leaking, illegal camps in parks and on streets, human vomit, urine and defecation on city sidewalks and in the doorways of businesses, used needles strewn about, homeless sleeping in doorways and bushes, confrontations, sexual deviancy, and physical attacks.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May Revise budget proposes an additional $650 million in spending on the state’s homeless, bring the grand total to $1 billion “to fight California’s homelessness crisis.”

A recent report found that Los Angeles spent $619 million last year on the homeless crisis, but have little to show for it, as we reported in California Globe recently. Gov. Gavin Newsom has authorized the state to spend $1 billion, and LA county and city governments collectively spend more than $1 billion annually on the costs of dealing with the growing homeless population. Thus far, spending billions on the homeless in California has largely increased the population to 134,000 homeless people, amounting to one-quarter of the nation’s total homeless population.

“This is becoming a ‘go-to’ city,” said Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg Wednesday at the end of his press conference on Sacramento’s growing homeless problem.