County Tax Measures Show Limits of Local Responses to Medicaid Cuts

A voter places their ballot in a drop box in Pasadena, California, during the state's primary election. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images.

The Republican-led assault on federal Medicaid funding was always going to be a nightmare for the states. Even in California, one of the nation’s wealthiest states by most definitions, experts are broadly predicting a health care crisis for millions due to the federal cuts.

But there’s another kind of chaos afoot in California: the scrambling attempts by individual counties to do what the state says it can’t and backfill some of those funding losses.