misleading

SACRAMENTO — Though raging thousands of miles to the east, the entrenched stalemate in Washington over federal spending and the ensuing government shutdown has thrust California’s expansive healthcare policies into the center of the pitched, partisan debate.

The Trump administration and the Republican leaders in Congress continue to use California, and the benefits the state has extended to eligible immigrants regardless of their legal status, as a cudgel against Democrats trying to extend federal subsidies for taxpayer-funded healthcare coverage.

President Trump claimed recently that Democrats “want to have illegal aliens come into our country and get massive healthcare at the cost to everybody else.” Democrats called Trump’s assertion an absolute lie, accusing Republicans of wanting to slash federal healthcare benefits to Americans in need to pay for tax breaks for the wealthy.

“California has led the nation in expanding access to affordable healthcare, but Donald Trump is ripping it away,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said.

In return for their votes to reopen the government, Democratic leaders in Congress want to reverse Medicaid cuts made in Republicans’ tax and spending bill passed this summer and continue subsidies through the Affordable Care Act, a program long targeted by Republicans. The subsidies, which come in the form of a tax credit, help lower health insurance costs for millions of Americans.

Can immigrants in the country illegally enroll in federal healthcare programs?

No. Undocumented immigrants are ineligible for Medicaid, Children’s Health Insurance Program or Medicare, or coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to KFF, an independent health research organization.

Rep. Kevin Mullin (D-South San Francisco) held a virtual town hall last week in which he highlighted the “misinformation” about immigrants and healthcare.

“I just want to be completely clear that federal funding does not pay for health insurance for undocumented immigrants, period,” Mullin said.

Jessica Altman, executive director of Covered California, said the debate is really over “who can benefit from the federal dollars that are flowing to all states, including California,” to help lower costs for health insurance.

Covered California serves as a marketplace exchange for state residents seeking healthcare insurance under the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, allowing them to select from name-brand insurance providers and choose from a variety of coverage plans. The vast majority of Californians receive federal subsidies to lower their premiums, including many middle-income families who had become eligible when Congress expanded the financial assistance in 2021.

Those expanded subsidies will expire at the end of the year, and Democrats are demanding that they be extended as part of any deal to reopen the government before they vote in favor of what is known as a continuing resolution, or a temporary funding bill to keep the federal government running.

“From the very beginning, undocumented or illegal — whatever terminology you want to use — individuals were never eligible for those tax credits, never eligible for those cost-sharing reductions, and in fact, and not even eligible to come onto a marketplace and buy coverage if they paid the full costs,” Altman said.

California does offer state healthcare coverage for undocumented immigrants

Through Medi-Cal, the state’s version of the federal Medicaid program, some medical coverage is offered, regardless of immigration status. The majority of that money comes from the state.

H.D. Palmer, deputy director for external affairs at the California Department of Finance, said the cost to provide Medi-Cal to undocumented immigrants in the current fiscal year is just over $12.5 billion.

State money accounts for $11.2 billion and the remaining difference is reimbursed with federal funding because it’s used to cover emergency services, Palmer explained.

“Under current law, hospitals that receive Medicaid are required to provide emergency care, including labor and delivery, to individuals regardless of their citizenship status,” he said. “That goes back to a budget law that was approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan.”

The 1986 law is called the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, and allows for emergency healthcare for all persons.

Some Republicans have raised other concerns about the state’s use of managed care organization taxes.

The MCO tax is a federally allowable Medicaid funding mechanism that imposes a tax on health insurance providers that charge fixed monthly payments for services and is based on the number of people enrolled in plans each month. The revenue from the tax can then be used to support Medicaid expenditures with federal matching funds.

Critics say California exploits a so-called loophole: By increasing the MCO tax, and subsequently bringing in more matching federal funds, California can then put more of its own state money toward healthcare for undocumented immigrants.

“We are bringing in all those additional federal dollars and then reallocating other money away so that we can provide about $9.6 billion for Medi-Cal for undocumented and illegal immigrants,” said Assemblymember David J. Tangipa (R-Fresno). “The MCO tax was never supposed to be weaponized in that process.”

White House officials also contend that California could not afford to put resources toward benefits for undocumented immigrants if it had not received the extra federal money — a claim Newsom disputes.

“What the president is saying, he’s lying,” Newsom said at a recent event. “Speaker [Mike] Johnson’s lying. They’re lying to the American people. It’s shameful. … I guess they’re trying to connect their displeasure with what California and many other states do with state resources in this space, and that is a very separate conversation.”

California is not alone in offering such healthcare to immigrants in the country illegally

A “small but growing” number of states offer state-funded coverage to certain groups of low-income people regardless of immigration status, according to KFF.

California became the first state in the nation last year to offer healthcare to all low-income undocumented immigrants, an expansion spearheaded by Newsom.

Newsom has since partially walked back that policy after the costs exceeded expectations. Starting in January, most adult Medi-Cal applications will be blocked — although current enrollees can continue to renew — and some adults will be required to pay monthly premiums. Undocumented minors under age 19, who became eligible for Medi-Cal nearly a decade ago, will not be affected by the changes.

The upcoming changes to the state’s policies and the enrollment freeze will help decrease the overall costs, which are projected to fall to about $10.1 billion during the next fiscal year, according to the California Department of Finance.

While the governor’s shift angered his most progressive allies and renewed speculation that he is tacking to the political middle ahead of his expected run for president in 2028, the Democratic-led Legislature approved the Medi-Cal eligibility changes in June.

Public opinion on the issue may also be changing.

Fifty-eight percent of adults in California were opposed to providing healthcare for undocumented immigrants, according to a poll released in June from the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California. This was a notable shift, as previous surveys from the institute conducted between 2015 to 2023 showed the majority approved.

Who would lose coverage if the tax credits end and Medicaid cuts aren’t reversed?

Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed by Republicans this summer, ends healthcare subsidies that were extended during the pandemic and makes other cuts to programs. According to the White House, the bill “contains the most important America First healthcare reforms ever enacted.”

“The policies represent a comprehensive effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse to strengthen the healthcare system for the most vulnerable Americans, ensuring that taxpayer dollars are focused on American citizens and do not subsidize healthcare for illegal immigrants,” the White House said in a statement on Oct. 1.

Among other things, the law limits Medicare and other program eligibility to certain groups, including green card holders, effective July 2025. Other lawfully present immigrants, including refugees and asylees, are no longer eligible, according to KFF.

It’s estimated that the eligibility restrictions will result in about 1.4 million lawfully present immigrants becoming uninsured, reduce federal spending by about $131 billion and increase federal revenue by $4.8 billion as of 2034, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

At the same time, a broader group of lawfully present immigrants, including refugees, will lose access to subsidized coverage through the ACA marketplace by January 2027.

Covered California’s Altman estimated that there are about 119,000 immigrants in California who are covered and would lose eligibility for financial assistance.

More broadly, Altman and other healthcare experts predict that healthcare premiums will skyrocket if the ACA tax credits expire.

WASHINGTON — Even as the presidential campaign ended with a triumph for President Bush on Wednesday, armchair strategists and capital insiders were still scratching their heads over exit poll results on Tuesday that strongly, and erroneously, suggested Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry was going to the White House.

“The 7-Hour Presidency of JFK2” was the ironic day-after headline on Slate’s Web log called “kausfiles.” The headline referred to the period of time on Tuesday when raw exit poll numbers favoring Kerry were flying through newsrooms and around the Internet.

Such data caused Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to become so despondent at one point Tuesday afternoon that she e-mailed her mother: “All is lost.”

Similarly, respected election watchers John Zogby and Frank Luntz declared Bush defeated before the sun had set on Washington. “I thought we captured a trend, but apparently that result didn’t materialize,” Zogby said in a statement posted Wednesday on his website.

Convulsions over exit polls, which sample the opinions of voters as they emerge from polling places, rippled up to the highest levels of both parties. President Bush was briefed on the data by advisor Karl Rove, according to White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan, and there was concern in the Bush camp in the late afternoon.

By contrast, the Massachusetts senator and his top aides were buoyed by raw — and entirely ephemeral — numbers that suggested he would carry such key states as Florida and Ohio, both of which ultimately went for Bush.

Pollsters and other analysts interviewed Wednesday said the exit polls — commissioned by a consortium of broadcast and cable television networks — had actually served their true function. They are not designed to predict winners and losers, but rather to help news analysts spot demographic and other trends.

The problem Tuesday arose when the raw exit poll data were treated by some who received it as the equivalent of a full-scale poll, without considering its limitations. Often exit polls, which are conducted quickly with a relatively small sampling of voters, fail to capture the true overall shape of the electorate.

In addition, the tight time frames can magnify distortions, especially in samplings taken early in the day, before a full spectrum of voters has been measured. This is especially true in a close, volatile election.

Though the early exit poll data proved misleading, experts said, the election results generally tracked closely with the findings of full-scale preelection polling.

For example, an average of the final week’s nonpartisan polls showed Bush with a 2-percentage-point lead over Kerry in the head-to-head national horse race, according to the website RealClearPolitics.com.

That was close to the 3-percentage-point victory margin Bush ultimately claimed, and it was within the margin of error.

Final battleground polls also forecast with relative accuracy the winners of most key states. Only in Wisconsin, where polls generally showed Bush with a tiny edge, did the outcome — a slim Kerry victory — belie the prediction.

“The preelection polls did a pretty good job — they mostly showed it either even or a small Bush lead,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, whose final poll nailed the outcome with a prediction of a three-point spread for Bush.

The final Los Angeles Times poll found a 49%-48% Bush lead nationally among likely voters — near enough to the final result to be within the margin of error.

Frank Newport, editor in chief of the Gallup Poll, acknowledged that Tuesday’s outcome did contradict one major preelection assumption of many pollsters: that undecided voters would break in Kerry’s direction.

Despite the exit polls’ limitations, they were eagerly inhaled by impatient amateur analysts — and plenty of political pros — as soon as raw numbers began to flow in starting at about 2 p.m. EST Tuesday. They were rapidly leaked to websites such as right-leaning Drudge Report and left-leaning dailykos.com.

Drudge posted a headline — “Kerry Finds Comfort in First Batch of Exit Polls” — that alarmed many Republicans.

By the evening, dailykos.com posted a batch of exit poll results that showed Kerry leading Bush 51% to 49% in Ohio and Florida and running better than expected in some other states.

The Times, which purchased portions of the survey data, was told Kerry had a 51% to 49% lead in Ohio and that the Democrat and Bush were locked in a dead heat in Florida. But Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus said the exit pollsters warned the newspaper that the states were too close to call.

The exit polls were conducted by Mitofsky International and Edison Media Research. Edison’s Joe Lenski, who helped oversee the surveys, said Wednesday he was happy with the results. The networks, which made no erroneous projections, were also pleased.

“I’m not designing polls for some blogger who doesn’t even understand how to read the data,” Lenski said. “It’s like if you were graded by your readers on the first draft of your article.”

But on election day, everyone in politics craves real-time data. Republican pollster Whit Ayres scanned the early numbers Tuesday and heard rumblings of fear from within his party.

“There were a lot of folks on my side who thought it was over,” Ayres said. “I worried, but once I looked carefully at the data, I realized it was ridiculously off.”

*

Times staff writer Esther Schrader contributed to this report.

In a news statement this week, the White House cherry-picked personal income tax-related elements in the “big, beautiful bill”, the wide-ranging tax and spending bill being pushed by United States President Donald Trump, and claimed that, in opposing the legislation as a whole, the Democratic Party was opposed to every individual item contained within it.

Such a tactic is misleading, particularly since the White House cited measures in the bill that have been championed by Democrats to improve the lives of Americans and are not the reasons the Democrats have given for opposing the “big beautiful bill”.

Here’s a fact-check of what the White House claims Democrats oppose:

“They’re opposing the largest tax cut in history, which will put an extra $5,000 in their pockets with a double-digit percent decrease to their tax bills. In fact, Americans earning between $30,000 and $80,000 will pay around 15% less in taxes.”

The specifics of the tax bill have not been finalised. In its current form, it would cut taxes by an average of 2.4 percent, for middle-income households, according to analysis by the Tax Policy Center.

While it is a significant tax cut, it is not the biggest in history. That was under Ronald Reagan in 1981 at 2.9 percent.

It is accurate that there will be a double-digit percentage decrease in tax bills, at least in the immediate term, at a little more than 11 percent across all tax brackets. It is also true that people earning between $30,000 and $80,000 will pay 15 percent less, according to the Non-Partisan Joint Committee on Taxation.

“They’re opposing NO TAX ON TIPS for the millions of Americans who work in the service industry and NO TAX ON OVERTIME for law enforcement, nurses, and more.”

This is true only in their opposition to Trump’s tax and spending bill.

Democrats and Republicans have supported the concept of no tax on tips. Both Donald Trump and the Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledged to do so on the campaign trail. Senate Democrats backed the No Tax on Tips Act, passed by the US Senate on May 20. The bill, authored by Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, was co-sponsored by notable Democrats, including Jacky Rosen of Nevada and passed unanimously.

“They’re opposing historic tax cuts for senior citizens”

Outside of the “big beautiful bill”, Democrats have generally not opposed tax cuts for seniors. Many Democrats have championed legislation that would expand tax cuts for seniors. California Democrat Jimmy Panetta co-sponsored a Republican led bill that would increase the standard deduction for adults over the age of 65 by $4,000.

In 2024, House Democrats introduced the “You Earned It, You Keep It Act”, which would effectively eliminate taxes on social security benefits. The bill, however, has never made it past committee.

“They’re opposing a boost to the child tax credit.”

Again, they are opposing Trump’s “big beautiful bill”, not objecting to the child tax credit.

In fact, Democrats have long pushed to expand the child tax credit. In April, Senate Democrats, including Georgia’s Raphael Warnock and Colorado’s Michael Bennett, introduced legislation that would expand the child tax credit. The bill would increase the tax credit, from $2,000 where it currently stands, to $6,360 for newborns, $4,320 for children ages one to six and $3,600 for children six to 17, permanently.

While the “big beautiful bill” would also increase the child tax credit, it would do so only by $500, and that would kick in in 2028.

“They’re opposing new savings accounts for newborns and the chance for children across America to experience the miracle of compounded growth.” 

In the “big beautiful bill”, House Republicans introduced new savings accounts for children. The accounts would include a $1,000 handout for every child born between January 1, 2025 and January 1, 2029.

Democrats have not only been supporters of the idea for savings accounts for newborns, but prominent Democrats actually championed it.

In 2018, Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced the American Opportunity Accounts Act, which would also give $1,000 to newborns and up to $2000 in annual contributions. He reintroduced the bill again in 2023.

“They’re opposing expanded access to childcare for hardworking American families.”

This appears to be false. The White House link refers to the Paid Family and Medical Leave Credit, not child care access. Trump’s bill offers up to 12 weeks of paid leave for employees who have worked a year and earn $57,600 or less.

While that gives parents more time at home, Democrats have focused on expanding access to child care, including universal pre-K. In 2023, Republicans opposed a Democratic plan to keep child care centres open that struggled in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“They’re opposing historic border security to keep their communities safe.”

Last year, Trump pressured Republicans to vote against a bipartisan border security bill, a move that reportedly helped Trump’s chances of winning in November 2024. Democrats have opposed Republican plans to use US military bases for migrant detention, arguing that it misuses Department of Defense resources. Democrats have long opposed border wall funding, including during Trump’s first term.

A 2018 Stanford University analysis estimated that a border wall would reduce migration by just 0.6 percent. Despite this, the “big beautiful bill” allocates more than $50bn to complete the wall and maritime crossings, $45bn for building and maintaining detention centres, and $14bn for transportation.

“They’re opposing expanded health savings accounts that give Americans greater choice and flexibility in how they spend their money.”

This is sort of true. Democrats have not been huge proponents of health savings accounts. The belief is that healthcare savings accounts do not help the socioeconomically disadvantaged, who may not have the financial resources to contribute to the accounts. Democrats have also objected to other cuts to healthcare in the bill, including the potential $880bn that could be cut from essential government programmes like Medicaid.

“They’re opposing scholarships that empower Americans to choose the education that best fits the needs of their families.”

In the bill, the White House is conflating the longstanding debate on school choice with scholarships. Under school choice, funds otherwise allocated to the public school system can be re-allocated to private institutions, which Republicans argue will allow students to have potential access to a higher quality education.

Democrats have opposed school choice because it diverts funds from public school systems, many of which are already drastically underfunded. In Texas, Senator Ted Cruz, for example, pushed legislation that would expand school choice, even as three out of four school districts in the state are underfunded, according to a Kinder Institute analysis.