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The Real Stakes Behind California's Billionaire Tax Fight: Health Care Access by Mark Kreidler
Just as California’s billionaires would prefer, the public conversation around a proposed one-time tax on a fraction of their immense wealth has become centered on a single threat: They’ll leave and take their money with them if the tax passes.
It’s a wild notion unsupported by history, but you can expect to hear more about it all the way to the Nov. 3 general election. That is partly because the billionaires themselves are spending huge in an effort to defeat the measure—with some of the largest contributions coming from those, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who claim they’ve already fled the state.
But there is another piece of the conversation that consistently isn’t getting enough attention here. It is the question of what California’s health care landscape will look like in the face of the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on Medicaid and the deep funding cuts that follow—reductions that revenues from the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act are meant to partly offset.
Increasingly, that landscape appears treacherous. And as recent comments from the CEO of one of Southern California’s most prominent nonprofit health systems make clear, the fallout will hit the state’s most vulnerable residents the hardest.
“The house of cards didn’t just weaken,” Chris Van Gorder, president and CEO of San Diego-based nonprofit Scripps Health, said in an essay posted to the health care industry site Becker’s Hospital Review. “It collapsed.”
It’s a wild notion unsupported by history, but you can expect to hear more about it all the way to the Nov. 3 general election. That is partly because the billionaires themselves are spending huge in an effort to defeat the measure—with some of the largest contributions coming from those, like Google co-founder Sergey Brin, who claim they’ve already fled the state.
But there is another piece of the conversation that consistently isn’t getting enough attention here. It is the question of what California’s health care landscape will look like in the face of the Trump administration’s wholesale attack on Medicaid and the deep funding cuts that follow—reductions that revenues from the 2026 Billionaire Tax Act are meant to partly offset.
Increasingly, that landscape appears treacherous. And as recent comments from the CEO of one of Southern California’s most prominent nonprofit health systems make clear, the fallout will hit the state’s most vulnerable residents the hardest.
“The house of cards didn’t just weaken,” Chris Van Gorder, president and CEO of San Diego-based nonprofit Scripps Health, said in an essay posted to the health care industry site Becker’s Hospital Review. “It collapsed.”
https://prospect.org/2026/05/22/real-stakes-californias-billionaire-tax-fight-health-care-access/
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