Transcription
We don't have a lot of people coming into the state capital through our policy committee process and our budget hearing process like you have in the room today. That's a problem.
As long as our issues are framed as the state is going to hurt the county, a lot of people hear that as government's competing for for dollars in order to to try to balance their their own budgets. The real fact here is that we absolutely have overlapping identical common constituencies.
Anything you can do with your greater ability to drum up grassroots support to to get letters into the portals. People don't have to go to Sacramento anymore. There's a tremendous amount of activity that comes into every analysis on every bill, including the budget bills that that's just basically the same kind of testimony we've heard today, but it should be coming in droves.
We hear a lot from your lobbyists. Every county has those, but it's important from us to hear from actual residents. Our process is that the governor puts out a base budget in January that frankly is oftentimes a piece of of gamesmanship work. We are asking for something to be put back in the budget that should have never been cut in the first place. So you're right to identify things like the uninsured medical cuts that shouldn't happen.
We are then forced when the governor does that to ask for that money back which obviously opens the door for him to ask for something from from us as well. Maybe something he likes a little more than we than we do. Everything that you've asked for this group of senators and assembly members have pushed very very hard for ever since that base budget proposal came out.
The governor at this point is calling the January budget a balanced budget despite the fact that that it's built on these draconian state funded medical cuts. And the appetite for new revenue measures thus far has revolved around closing the so-called W's edge loophole which would raise a few billion dollars and a medical backfill that's targeted at large employers big retailers you know who they are and others who basically provide no healthcare benefits and push their employees you know onto our Medicaid roles insured or uninsured with a twothirds vote of both spouses. We could correct that.
Now, when you combine those two things, you pick up as much as $12 billion a year. I don't know how any executive in any state criticizes HR1 and the federal government for making draconian medical cuts while at the same time putting a state budget out that does the same damn day.