Damn, Gavin Newsom Really Hates Poor People

He wants to take Medicaid from disabled and elderly people who have more than $2000 in assets.

He’s starting to look a little like Judge Doom. Image: Gage Skidmore

$2000 doesn’t take you very far anywhere in the United States these days. In fact, it will not take you as far as a month in Martin County, Kentucky, which has the lowest cost of living in the country … and where the living wage, the lowest possible wage one can live on, for a single adult would come to $3247 a month (the hourly living wage, by the way, would be $18.74 and the actual minimum wage is $7.25).

It definitely isn’t going to take you anywhere in California. In Modoc County, which has the lowest cost of living in the state, you would have to make $3684 a month to survive. For the state itself? $4978 a month.

Why am I telling you this? Because California Gov. Gavin Newsom has decided that an elderly or disabled person with total assets (assets!) of more than $2000 is far too wealthy to qualify for Medi-Cal, the state’s implementation of the Medicaid program. This means that if they own a home worth more than $2000 (which is all of the homes), they have to sell their home. And they can’t just then go and live in their car, because if that is worth more than $2000, they would have to sell the car and spend the money before qualifying. Then, not only do they not have a car to live in, they don’t have a car to get to their medical appointments — which, one assumes, is the reason they wanted Medi-Cal in the first place.

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It’s worth noting that California does not have a special “California cost of living” adjustment for qualifying for Medi-Cal. Like other Medicaid expansion states, it is available to those making less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line — $21,597 a year. Even without the asset test, the income limits are still there, and anyone earning more than $1800 a month doesn’t qualify.

The asset test, by the way, will only apply to the disabled and to elderly people over the age of 65. While people over 65 can still rely on Medicare for some things, those who need long-term care (which Medicare doesn’t cover) or are still too poor to cover co-pays can supplement it with Medi-Cal.

This seems like a bad plan! In fact, we know it’s a bad plan because it was the plan for decades. It first changed in 2022, where the limit was raised to a far more reasonable $130,000. In 2024, the asset test was eliminated entirely, which was an amazing development for the elderly and people living with disabilities, but now Newsom wants go go back, citing budget balancing issues.

Except the thing is, in addition to being cruel, this option will actually end up costing more in the long run. In-home care costs the state $25,400 per patient per year, but if these people are forced to sell their assets and use up their retirement savings, they’re going to end up in nursing homes, which Medi-Cal does cover, and which costs the state, for each patient, $114,000 a year.

Not to mention the fact that you have to pay a whole lot of people to be on top of whether or not a double amputee has more than $2000 in the bank at any given time, kick them off the program and then re-enroll them when it dips back under that. That costs money!

“This is going to lead to more homelessness of seniors and the disabled. That’s what’s going to happen, and that will cost our state money too,” Assemblymember Pilar Schiavo told CalMatters, while also acknowledging the high cost of nursing home care.

Newsom says it’s necessary to deal with the state’s $12 billion deficit, and I suppose quadriplegics who require in-home care are an easier target than the many, many obscenely rich people who live in the state and could probably stand to pay more in taxes. Or who don’t pay their taxes at all! Or who, I don’t know, are shady lawyers who steal the settlement money they won for widows, orphans, and burn victims so that they can fund their wife’s singing career and be “extraordinarily generous” to Gavin Newsom.

California does have one of the highest marginal tax rates in the country — 12.3 percent for the highest earners and an extra 1 percent mental health services tax for those making over a million — but when you consider the absolutely obscene wealth some of these people have, it could probably be a little more! Speaking of “assets,” because of Proposition 13, property taxes can only be 1 percent of a home’s total value — meaning that property taxes are far lower there than in most of the country.

On average, Medi-Cal spends about $8,000 per year, per person. With 15 million Californians on it — about 40 percent of the population — it does get expensive. When the asset test was eliminated last year, many more seniors (whose care costs more, on average $15,000 per year) enrolled in the program, increasing costs by $500 million. I get it! That’s a lot of money. Newsom says reinstating the asset test would save the state $94 million the first year and $500 million the year after that, but at what cost?

I mean, what is he going to do? Put this into effect so that these people end up homeless, so that he can then go to their encampments and “heroically” start throwing away their meager possessions?

California is the richest state in the nation, and yet 40 percent of the people there are making so little that they qualify for Medicaid. A majority, 56 percent, of children in the state are on it as well. That is a straight dystopian level of wealth inequality — and yet, this man wants to kick the elderly and disabled off their health care and can’t figure out why there are so many unhoused people living there. You know, instead of in apartments that definitely cost over $2000 a month.

You can’t make things impossible for people and then wonder why everything is fucked up.

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Part of the reason Newsom is doing shit like this is because he clearly wants to run for president, and he wants to not only be seen as a moderate, but as a MAGA-friendly moderate. He’s chatting with Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and throwing trans people as far under the bus as he can. And yet! Donald Trump is still out on his Truth Social threatening Newsom that, like an absolute psychopath, he will fine the state of California for allowing a teenage trans girl (who, by the way, was fully supported by her peers) to compete in a track competition.

I’d love to say that all he’s going to do is lose the Democratic base while gaining absolutely nothing from the other side, but if he takes people’s healthcare away, he’s also going to end up killing some people as well. And I’d say that’s a little worse.