The
AP version of this story pegs the "errors" at $1.9B. I won't quote from the AP-credited articles due to CC concerns with AP snarkiness about quoting their articles, even for "fair use". The article claims the "errors" were discovered and revealed to legislators, so they could make "adjustments" to the current budget (CA's fiscal year begins July 1), but the "discovery" is only being made public some 4 months later, when Brown gave his draft budget for next year to the legislature.
The "errors" all have to do with Medi-Cal: $478M of pharmaceutical company rebates the state had to pay to the Feds the budgeteers "forgot" to include in the budget; $913M due to double-counting of estimated "savings" in Medi-Cal; $573M of costs "under-count" in San Mateo and Orange Counties (one AP-based article said that those two counties had not participated in some part of Medi-Cal, and the budgeteers "forgot" to include the additional cost of their participation to the budget).
[Snark] This is what CA gets for hiring accounting types who learned adding and subtracting by
New New Math techniques.
[/Snark]I smell three rats in this.
The first is obvious. I do not trust CA's
budgeteers. They've been papering over CA's budget problems for at least 2 or 3 decades using accounting gimmicks, shifting $$ from long-term funds into general fund current use, and under-contributing to pension funds. The $913M over-estimate of "savings" in Medi-Cal especially reeks of
budgeteers' fudgery.
Second, huge increases in states' programs like Medi-Cal were built into
OhBummerCare. This also reeks of an effort to make
OhBummerCare look less awful than it is.
Third, this was revealed to the legislature ~4 months ago, but kept secret till now, after the election. CA's legislature has 120 members, 38 of them Rs (the Ds have super-majorities in both houses), and each member has several staff. None of those hundreds of legislators and staff people said a peep about this, even accidentally, in the past 4 months? That isn't credible. Given that most "reporters" and MSM outlets are basically unpaid D operatives with press credentials (prostitutes are paid!), this reeks of collusion between the local MSM and legislators (possibly including Rs!) to keep a blockbuster budgetary @#$%-up out of public knowledge until after the election.
