The lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday, alleges that California has created an “unequal system of healthcare” that discriminates against lower class residents of the state, the majority of whom are Hispanic. Essentially, the lawsuit is saying that racism is to blame for the failure of Medi-Cal – the state’s healthcare program for poorer Californians – to sufficiently reimburse doctors for treatments.
“In effect, California has created a separate and unequal system of health care, one for the insurance program with the largest proportion of Latinos (Medi-Cal), and one for the other principal insurance plans, whose recipients are disproportionately white,” says the lawsuit, which was filed by five Latino residents who depend on the state’s Medi-Cal system.
But according to one spokeswoman for the California Department of Health Care Services, the faults with Medi-Cal outlined in the lawsuit are over exaggerated. Spokeswoman Carol Sloan explained in an emailed statement that the department “has not identified any systemic problems with patient access to services in the Medi-Cal program,” and neither have federal officials.
Thomas Saenz, who is one of the attorneys who helped file the lawsuit, says that taking a legal approach against the State of California is reasonable considering the fact that California has passed legislation prohibiting discrimination in state-run programs. However, the idea that the Medi-Cal program was explicitly designed in such a way that is racist and discriminatory against Hispanic residents of California is questionable at best. If Hispanics living in California make up most of the lower class and the healthcare systems they participate in reflect this reality, how does that have anything to do with racism?
The real issue here is an issue that has been debated in the national spotlight for decades – the out of control, ever expanding welfare state that in many cases is doing nothing but creating a sense of government dependency while simultaneously taking money away from those of us who go out and earn it.
Earlier this year, CNS News reported that Barack Obama was the first president of the United States to spend more on welfare and entitlements than on national defense, which really is unsurprising considering the tyrannical nature of America's former president. According to the Office of Management and Budget, in every single fiscal year between 1962 and 2014, national defense spending exceeded spending on welfare and government handouts.
In 2014, the last year that the United States government spent more on defense than on welfare, defense spending for the fiscal year was $603,457,000,000, compared to 601,700,000,000 on entitlements. However, in 2015, defense spending dropped to $589,965,000,000 while entitlement spending jumped to $666,900,000,000, making 2015 the first year that welfare spending exceeded national defense spending.
Under former president Barack Obama, one of the biggest advocates for a large, centralized government in modern history, the number of Americans on food stamps skyrocketed. According to data released by the Department of Agriculture, the number of food stamp recipients increased by an astonishing 32 percent, or 10.7 million people, since Barack Obama first stepped into the Oval Office in 2009. Additionally, this increase in food stamp recipients has been a significant burden on the taxpayer. In 2009, food stamp recipients received $50.3 billion in benefits, and by 2016, that number had jumped to $66.6 billion.
Needless to say, the progressives in California and all across the country have created more than an overgenerous welfare state; they have created a sense of dependency on the federal government that sadly won’t go away any time soon. Far too many Americans falsely believe that they are entitled to everybody else’s labor, when they should be embracing America’s tradition of rugged individualism and personal independence.
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