Washington State and Florida don\u2019t have a lot in common: aside from being at opposite corners of the country, both their political climates and their actual climates are poles apart.\u00a0 But one thing they do suddenly have in common are bills in their state legislatures to provide taxpayer-funded healthcare to illegal aliens.\u00a0 In common between them, too, is that neither state has infinite resources, a fact that evidently must come as a great surprise to the supporters of these fiscally reckless bills.<\/p>\n
Washington Senate Bill 5957<\/a> and Florida\u2019s two bills, House Bill 1385<\/a> and Senate Bill 1872<\/a>, aren\u2019t just similar: they\u2019re virtually identical.\u00a0 You might suspect the same people probably drafted them.\u00a0 That\u2019s because they both copy nearly word-for-word a single-payer healthcare bill introduced last year in California, Senate Bill 562<\/a>, the so-called \u201cHealthy California Act.\u201d\u00a0 As with seemingly everything to come out of California lately, one of its main goals appears to have been giving as many handouts as possible to illegal aliens at the expense of American taxpayers.<\/p>\n In one section after another, the California bill makes clear repeatedly that illegal aliens should get all the same benefits as U.S. citizens and legal residents, and that not giving them these benefits would be \u201cdiscrimination.\u201d\u00a0 On top of that, the single-payer healthcare system that it creates might as well be called \u201csanctuary healthcare\u201d because the bill prohibits both disclosure of immigration status information and any kind of cooperation or assistance with federal immigration authorities.\u00a0 And all these provisions are copied virtually unchanged straight into Washington\u2019s and Florida\u2019s bills.<\/p>\n SB 562 proved too extreme and expensive even for California: the state\u2019s own fiscal analysis<\/a> said it would cost $400 billion, half of which would require new revenue.\u00a0 That would have been more than twice the state\u2019s total 2017-18 budget<\/a>, \u201cwhich includes $183.3 billion in spending.\u201d\u00a0 But of course it was the overall price tag that was the \u201cgigantic brick wall\u201d that made it a \u201cnonstarter,\u201d<\/a> not the fact that it heaped yet more public benefits on illegal aliens.<\/p>\n Washington State faced a budget shortfall last year, and just barely averted a state shutdown<\/a> by raising taxes<\/a> at the last minute.\u00a0 It\u2019s already expected<\/a> to face a similar crunch this year, and that\u2019s without creating a massive new welfare program for illegal aliens.<\/p>\n Florida\u2019s fiscal situation was a little bit better than Washington\u2019s\u2014that is, until Hurricane Irma hit the Sunshine State in September.\u00a0 Inflation-adjusted recovery costs are likely to match<\/a> those from Wilma in 2005 and Andrew in 1992, while revenue can be expected to drop.\u00a0 In the wake of the storm, the legislature\u2019s chief economist has projected that the state\u2019s small anticipated surplus is gone, replaced by $500-million deficits for at least the next three years<\/a> without major changes.<\/p>\n If there\u2019s anything that\u2019s almost certain, it\u2019s that government programs never come in under budget.\u00a0 If there\u2019s anything else that might be even more certain, it\u2019s that creating expensive new benefit programs for illegal aliens just attracts even more illegal aliens, which makes those programs still more expensive.\u00a0 Neither Washington nor Florida could afford these costly bills even in the best of times, let alone now, and they should reject them.