United Way of California

The “Better Care Reconciliation Act” released by the Senate Majority today is anything but better.  It will degrade health coverage for everyone, and deprive it altogether from millions of Americans. In fact it appears to be worse than the American Health Care Act passed by the House last month. America’s modern health system has been built around employer-sponsored health insurance.  According to Forbes, 170 million Americans receive health coverage through plans sponsored by their employers. The BCRA will require most of those 170 million to pay more for worse health care coverage, by eliminating requirements for essential health ...

The economic well-being of hundreds of thousands of working Californians hangs in the balance as California’s Budget Conference Committee meets to work out their disagreements for the 2017-2018 budget before final negotiations with Governor Brown. This legislative budget will get us one step closer to determining whether California’s Earned Income Tax Credit (CalEITC) will support self-employed, “gig-economy” workers. Both houses have luckily already agreed that outreach dollars again are needed to build awareness of the CalEITC among the very low-income workers living in poverty and just trying every day to make ends meet. The CalEITC is a r...

The American Health Care Act passed today by the U.S. House of Representatives will have a devastating impact on California’s children and families. This new version of the bill is significantly worse than the previous version, which the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated would result in over 24 million Americans losing health insurance. Congress rushed this through before getting an independent analysis from CBO, which means that our nation’s leaders and their constituents have no idea how much worse it’s gotten and how many more people will lose coverage. At a minimum, we know that the bill guts Medicaid, cutting more than $8...