Capitol Corner | July 2025

The dog days of summer have arrived in Sacramento with legislators, staff, lobbyists, and interested group representatives all talking about the warm to hot to very hot weather outdoors and the warm to hot to very hot climate inside the offices, halls, hearing rooms, and legislative chambers of the State Capitol.

Summer brings to Sacramento the annual budget debate and deliberations on scores if not hundreds of bills that managed to make their way through their house of origin and are now being vetted by policy committees in the opposite house.  Assembly Members are spending lots of time trying to convince Senators to pass their bills, and Senators are doing the same thing in the Assembly.  The idea is that with a bicameral legislature, far more eyes are on policy proposals than if they were just passed by one house and sent to the Governor for his consideration.  That’s why Congress operates bicamerally as do 49 states with the exception of the unicameral Nebraska Legislature.

At the same time, the budget debate in Sacramento is in full bloom with the Governor’s initial January proposal and his “May Revise” budget behind us, while the Legislature has technically met its budget passage deadline by sending a rudimentary budget framework proposal to the Governor as a way in which to prevent their pay from being halted by not “passing” a budget bill by the June 15 deadline.  And the Governor needs to sign that bill by July 1.  However, it is important to note that all these budget machinations simply kick off the budget process that will proceed over the next few weeks with the Assembly and Senate in full negotiations with each other, the Administration, and interest groups (CAHSAH included!) and “budget trailer bills” (all small parts of the budget whole) being implemented in a serial fashion with a full budget coming together sometime thereafter..  And if that’s not enough, all of this is occurring amid great uncertainty related to federal funding that in many cases augments the state budget, especially programs like Medi-Cal and other partial or totally federally funded programs that have a direct impact on our state’s spending priorities.

During this period, CAHSAH will be reading all newly introduced, amended, and gutted and amended bills, meeting with legislators and staff, testifying at policy and budget committee hearings, and working with like-minded allies within and outside the health care community to ensure that our policy and budget priorities are shared with those who will intimately decide their fate.