The Brief

A budget proposal from House Republicans, if implemented, could mean cuts to Medicaid, according to analysts.

California's Medicaid program is called Medi-Cal, and it provides healthcare for more than one third of Californians, according to the California Budget & Policy Center.

With Medicaid and Medi-Cal in the news, LAist put together a Q&A about the program, how it's funded and who it serves.

Medi-Cal is Medicaid?

Yes. California just has a different name for it.

Nicole Jorwic with the advocacy organization Caring Across told LAist that some people get confused because of the different names, but that it's important Californians know that when they hear about Medicaid, for us that means Medi-Cal.

Who is covered by Medi-Cal?

Californians under a certain income level are eligible for Medi-Cal coverage — up to 138% of the federal policy level for adults and up to 213% for pregnant people.

Other people who can access Medi-Cal include people who are 65 and older, are blind or disabled, are in long-term care, or former foster care youth up to the age of 26.

How is Medi-Cal funded?

Medi-Cal receives funds from the state and the federal government. Nearly two-thirds of the state's Medi-Cal funding is federal.

How many kids in California are covered by Medi-Cal?

More than 40% of California children are covered by Medi-Cal, per the California Health Care Foundation.

What is the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP)?

CHIP allows some families above Medicaid income thresholds to access low-cost health insurance for children.

How has Medi-Cal changed over the years?

The number of people enrolled in Medi-Cal has quadrupled in size since 1990, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

A huge bump in those numbers came following the Affordable Care Act, which allowed adults without disabilities or kids to access Medicaid. As of 2024, one-third of Medi-Cal members became eligible under the ACA, per the Public Policy Institute's report.

Medi-Cal has continued expanding. In 2024, all undocumented people who meet income limits became eligible.

That growth has not been without its challenges. California is currently $6.2 billion over projected Medi-Cal spending, according to recent reporting from CalMatters.

How have challenges to Medicaid looked in the past?

In 2017, House Republicans passed a bill that would have walked back parts of the Affordable Care Act, and shrunk Medicaid eligibility. It didn't make it through the Senate.

How could cuts or changes to Medicaid look this time around?

The House budget bill does not include details on how proposed cuts might be achieved.

Adriana Ramos-Yamamoto, a policy analyst with the California Budget & Policy Center, said one approach could include enacting a work requirement for Medicaid, which could lead to many people losing coverage due to ineligibility or inability to navigate the bureaucracy.

Our partners at KFF Health News also took a detailed look at how cuts to Medicaid could look in California.

Would cuts to Medicaid impact other services?

Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, which gives pregnant people and young mothers under a certain income level free nutritional food and breast-feeding support, could be affected by changes to Medicaid. According to the National WIC Association, that's because of "adjunct eligibility" — which allows families to prove that they're eligible for WIC benefits by showing they already receive other services like Medicaid.

" We know that streamlining the application process for each of these programs, removing administrative burdens, makes it more likely that families will choose to participate, and makes it easier for them to do so," said Nell Menefee-Libey with the National WIC Association. "So any proposals that could result in families losing access to Medicaid or to SNAP would also make it harder for them to access WIC."

Jackie, the bald eagle whose livestreamed life with her partner Shadow won the hearts of fans worldwide, has died, rescuers announced Monday.

The famous raptor, believed to be 14 years old, was receiving intensive care at the Ojai Raptor Center for severe anemia. She ultimately succumbed to her condition after a team of veterinarians struggled for weeks to figure out what was causing it.

Jackie remained critically ill despite receiving oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock monitoring. 

"We know this news will be deeply felt by the many thousands of people around the world who have followed her journey, hoped alongside us, prayed for her, and supported the people caring for her,” the Ojai Raptor Center said in an Instagram post. “Our team is heartbroken. It has been an extraordinary privilege to care for her."

Friends of Big Bear Valley, the nonprofit that launched the popular nest livestream in 2015, confirmed the news on social media.

“It is with great sadness and heavy hearts, to bring you the latest update from Ojai Raptor Center,” the nonprofit said to its roughly 1.3 million Facebook followers. “Please be kind to yourself, to others, to the FOBBV team and to those at the Ojai Raptor Center. Soar free Jackie…”

What happened to her?

The rescue center said on social media Sunday that she was “critically ill,” “unstable” and still in an "extremely serious” condition.

She was getting oxygen therapy, supportive treatment and around-the-clock care from vets and specialists across the country. But her red blood cell levels continued to drop well below normal after rebounding a bit after she was rescued.

Jackie was rescued in July by Big Bear’s Dana Point Park after a brief fight with two other eagles. Jackie was weak, vulnerable, underweight and unable to fly, according to the Ojai Raptor Center.

The center said the fight is likely what left her grounded, but her condition suggests she had been sick for some time.

How Jackie’s Big Bear saga started

Jackie was the matriarch of the famous Big Bear bald eagle nest since around 2017. She’s believed to be the first bald eagle chick hatched in Big Bear Valley in recent history, according to the nonprofit.

The pair believed to be her parents, Ricky and Lucy, left the area around 2016. The young Jackie then started hanging out in their old nest, where the livestream camera had been installed.

Jackie took on her first mate, a bald eagle known as Mr. B, and laid her first clutch of eggs in the nest the following season. Shadow came into the picture in the summer of 2018, refusing to leave until Mr. B eventually flew away from the area, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Jackie and Shadow were mates ever since. They successfully raised six chicks together — Sandy and Luna this season, Sunny and Gizmo last year, Spirit in 2022 and Simba in 2019.

Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.

A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House elections and single-member congressional districts and instead moving toward proportional representation, a system that elects multiple representatives in a single district in rough proportion to a party's vote share.

Earlier this summer, about 500 democracy and legal experts sent a letter to Congress urging members to consider proportional representation as a solution to the redistricting brinksmanship set off by President Donald Trump last year.

"There should be little doubt that the single-member district system is failing to deliver fair and representative outcomes," they wrote. "We urge Congress to adopt a proportional system of representation, solving the gerrymandering problem at its source."

According to the poll conducted by the advocacy group Fix Our House and liberal think tank New America, half of 1,000 respondents said they support proportional representation, with nearly a quarter opposed. A third of those who participated said they were not sure whether they supported it or not.

Lee Drutman, a senior fellow at New America, said he was surprised to see how much backing there is for proportional representation, despite the idea being fairly obscure in the United States.

"It really did shock me how supportive people were of the various principles of proportional representation across the board," he told NPR.

While support was highest among younger, more educated, more left-leaning voters, Drutman found that 6 in 10 Trump voters who have an opinion on proportional representation said they back it, too.

American voters want more political parties

Pollsters also walked respondents through some of the tradeoffs of proportional representation — including that it can lead to multiple parties having to find a way to work together.

"For every one of those questions, people prefer the proportional system with multiple parties," Drutman said, "even if it leads to a coalition government that is maybe not quite as efficient."

He said voters also weren't very concerned when asked about the possibility of proportional representation leading to some more extreme political parties.

"One thing people said is they already think the parties are pretty extreme right now," Drutman explained. "So that's not quite the fear that some in the political class think it would be."

Jocelyn Kiley, director of political research at the Pew Research Center, said voters writ large have been in a "prolonged period of disaffection with politics and the political system."

She said Pew has found there is a lot of openness to reform, with nearly 70% of respondents to its polls saying they wish, at least somewhat, there were more political parties to choose from.

Kiley said detailed knowledge of what any election reform would look like is rare among voters. And she said that when many reforms "move from theory to practice," they often hit some resistance.

"People want to understand exactly how that reform will impact them," she said.

Room for a national conversation

Drutman told NPR the new poll numbers mark a starting point for what could be a national conversation about how to break out of the country's two-party system.

"People are dissatisfied," he said. "People are frustrated. People don't have a language for how to talk about alternatives because they haven't really heard all that much about the alternatives, because we haven't had a national conversation about the alternatives yet. So, there's a lot of room to have that conversation."

Drutman said only about a quarter of the respondents were aware that there are alternatives to a two-party system, and even fewer people could name an alternative when pressed.

In fact, only about 2% of the participants in the poll could name proportional representation off the top of their heads, said Dustin Wahl, executive director of Fix Our House,

"But when asked about the kind of underlying values beneath it and the component parts, there was widespread support from all across the political spectrum," Wahl said. "And that's not something we would have expected to see necessarily four years ago, for instance. But as the problems grow, the desire for solutions grows, as well."

Proportional representation is currently the most widely used electoral system among the world's democracies. Wahl points out that the U.S., along with the likes of Canada and Australia, has a system that was abandoned long ago by other countries.

"Arguably the only reason we don't use proportional representation is because it wasn't used anywhere in the world at the time of [America's] founding," he said. "And we just kept doing elections the same way."

The poll also found a majority support (54%) for expanding the House, with 150 new members.

There are bills in Congress, with all Democratic co-sponsors, that would study or move the U.S. to a system of proportional representation, but Wahl said any bill that doesn't include expanding the House is "politically dead in the water" because without expansion, lawmakers have to choose to potentially vote themselves out of office.

"That [150-seat expansion] gives you enough of a cushion so that members, incumbents know that they're very likely to hold on to their seats," he said. "It wouldn't run into the problem, at all, of candidates or of sitting members of Congress thinking that they're going to lose their seats because their elections would be totally untouched."
Copyright 2026 NPR

For six years, Californians have been able to shake up a craft cocktail at home using alcohol delivered to their doorstep. Now, it’s last call for the distillery deliveries, unless lawmakers intervene by the end of this month.

That’s unlikely, thanks to opposition from California’s wine industry, Teamsters union truck drivers and corporate alcohol wholesalers and distributors.

The influential, well-funded groups lobbied the Legislature behind closed doors this year to block legislation that would have made permanent pandemic-era rules that allowed craft distillers to ship spirits directly to their customers.

During the pandemic lockdowns, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order that allowed craft distillers to ship spirits to their customers’ homes. In the years since, lawmakers passed temporary laws allowing craft distillers — defined as those that produce up to 150,000 gallons a year — to keep shipping their spirits.

The latest extension expires Dec. 31.

“I don’t have a lot of hope that we’re going to be able to salvage this,” said Folsom Republican Assemblymember Josh Hoover. He tried unsuccessfully this year to amend one of his bills to let small distillers continue shipping directly to their customers.

The groups blocking Hoover’s proposal have spent more than $1 million lobbying the Legislature and state government this year. They have donated at least 11 times that much to California politicians and their campaigns over the years.

The craft distillers, who have spent a fraction as much on state politics, say all that spending from the opposition, particularly from corporate liquor distributors, appears to have paid off.

Cris Steller, owner of Dry Diggins Distillery, talks about the various products that are made in his distillery.

(

Fred Greaves

/

CalMatters

)

Bottles are filled with whiskey in the bottling area of Dry Diggins Distillery in El Dorado Hills on Aug. 4, 2026.

(

Fred Greaves

/

CalMatters

)

“They went directly to legislators’ offices and basically torpedoed any effort we came up with,” said Cris Steller, acting executive director of the California Distillers Association and the owner of Amador and Dry Diggings Distillery in El Dorado Hills, a family-run business that makes whiskey, brandy, vodka and gin.

The fight is about more than whether Californians can have a bottle of whiskey or gin delivered. It illustrates how decisions are made in Sacramento, where wealthy and powerful interests can shape or kill policy in secret negotiations with lawmakers. Politicians, in turn, benefit when proposals die quietly because they don’t have to explain their decisions to voters.

Opponents insist they aren’t using the political system to crush competitors as national alcohol sales slump.

Instead, representatives of the major alcohol wholesalers and distributors that stock shelves at liquor retailers say they oppose the proposal because it primarily benefits out-of-state companies and weakens safeguards that include preventing alcohol deliveries to minors.

Teamsters lobbyist Matt Broad said the labor group’s truck drivers aren’t opposed to allowing craft distillers to ship their product. They just want them to use established shipping companies that have actual employees, including those that employ Teamsters, such as UPS.

Those companies have standards to ensure legal delivery, Broad said. When they employ drivers rather than use contractors, the companies — not the drivers — bear legal liability.

Federal law preempts California from mandating hiring unionized truck drivers, Broad said.

“We are absolutely not opposed to the little guys being able to ship directly to consumers, and in fact, we have a track record of supporting the proposal but with meaningful guardrails that protect our members and protect the public,” he told CalMatters.

The California wine industry, which has been allowed to ship bottles directly to customers in California for decades, isn’t necessarily opposed either. But its representative says wine sellers are leery of giving little alcohol sellers delivery rights when big liquor companies deserve the same. Wineries of any size can ship to their customers in California.

Big booze, big labor spend big

The U.S. Postal Service prohibits most alcohol shipments to homes, but California allows certain types of alcohol sellers to use private shipping companies. Breweries are prohibited from shipping directly to California customers.

Hoover hoped his Assembly Bill 2211, a proposal to give craft distillers the ability to offer tastings and sell spirits at locations other than their distilleries, could be amended to give craft distillers a permanent direct-to-consumer provision.

It has advanced through the Legislature without formal opposition or any lawmaker voting against it, according to CalMatters’ Digital Democracy database. The measure is pending before the full Senate.

There may be no formal opposition, but reports filed with the California secretary of state show an extensive behind-the-scenes lobbying effort aimed at preventing any changes.

At least six groups, including some of the biggest national alcohol distributors, have reported lobbying on Hoover’s bill.

The reports show those groups spent more than $1 million on lobbying this year. State ethics laws only require entities to report the total amount they spent lobbying the government in a year. They’re not required to report how much they spent on specific legislation, so it’s unclear how much they spent trying to influence lawmakers as they considered AB 2211 and its never-published direct-shipping amendment.

Those groups, along with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Wine Institute, have given at least $11 million to both Democrats and Republicans in California since 2000, according to Digital Democracy, including at least $738,000 since 2025, the start of the current two-year legislative session.

By comparison, California’s craft distillers reported spending $54,000 on lobbying this year.

They reported just three donations to lawmakers in the past decade, according to Digital Democracy. One was a $42 bottle of whiskey in 2022 to former Napa Democratic Sen. Bill Dodd, who now lobbies on behalf of the craft distillery industry. In 2023, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas received $215 in tequila. Democratic Assemblymember-turned U.S. Rep. Adam Gray received a $1,300 campaign donation in 2016.

Hoover said he has been trying since last year to add language to his bill that would allow craft distillers to permanently keep shipping. He succeeded last year in getting the extension that expires Dec. 31, but this year he’s been unable to overcome the opposition to expanding the tasting room measure.

“I’m always open to figuring this out, if there’s a way that we can make this work. … but I don’t have a lot of hope that this bill is going to preserve those provisions this year,” he said.

With less than a month left before the Legislature finishes for the year on Aug. 31, Democratic leaders would likely need to sign off on changes to Hoover’s tasting room measure. They’ve offered little indication they intend to intervene for craft distillers.

Rivas, who’s received at least $108,000 in donations over the years from opponents of Hoover’s unpublished proposal, declined CalMatters’ request for an interview. Senate President Pro Tem Monique Limón, who’s received at least $33,000, responded to an interview request with an emailed statement saying she is aware of the pending deadline.

“This bill will continue to work its way through the legislative process as intended,” it said.

Bottles of spirits produced by Dry Diggins Distillery in El Dorado Hills on Aug. 4, 2026.

(

Fred Greaves

/

CalMatters

)

Democratic Sen. Susan Rubio and her sister, Democratic Assemblymember Blanca Rubio, oversee the committees that regulate California’s alcohol industry. When Hoover’s measure passed through their committees, the chairs could have allowed Hoover to add the direct-to-consumer amendment. They did not.

Susan Rubio has received at least $65,000 in donations from the groups blocking the direct-shipping proposal, according to Digital Democracy. Blanca Rubio has received at least $129,000.

Sen. Rubio’s spokesperson, Giovanni Ruiz Reyes, responded to interview requests with emailed statements. The first said “conversations between stakeholders are ongoing” and that she “looks forward” to reviewing potential legislation.

Ruiz Reyes said in a second statement Thursday that she’s supported four previous extensions of the craft distiller shipping policy.

“There is currently no bill or amendment before the committee seeking another extension,” Ruiz Reyes said. “Accordingly, it would be inaccurate to suggest that Senator Rubio or the committee has blocked or refused to hear an extension when no such proposal is currently before the committee.”

Assemblymember Rubio didn’t return interview requests.

Fewer Americans are drinking 

The liquor industry is facing a nationwide decline as more Americans cut back on drinking.

In that difficult business climate, corporate liquor wholesalers and distribution companies lobbied “to obliterate competition,” said Dodd, the former state senator from wine country lobbying on behalf of craft distillers.

“We oppose any effort to make DTC (direct to consumer) permanent,” the Wine & Spirits Wholesalers of America, the California Beer & Beverage Distributors and the California Family Beer Distributors wrote in a joint statement to CalMatters.

Craft distilleries’ direct shipping “was always meant to be temporary pandemic relief, and it’s expiring exactly as designed, six years later” said the groups, which represent local and national companies that move many of America’s best-known beer, wine and liquor brands. They argue that after the law expires, spirits can still be delivered to customers through services such as DoorDash. DoorDash is listed as a member of the Wine & Spirit Wholesalers of America on its website.

The groups’ representative, Kevin Luckey, declined an interview request.

Steve Gross, president and CEO of the Wine Institute, said the wine industry has worked hard over the decades to have large and small wine sellers treated equally under California and national alcohol distribution laws. He said it would undermine his industry’s efforts if small distillers get delivery rights in California when large ones don’t have them.

“They have the option to go in and try and fight for a bill that we and others could also support,” Gross said. “They’ve chosen not to because those larger distillers are not their members.”

The Wine Institute is a lobbying group that represents more than 700 large and small wine sellers, including one of the world’s largest, Modesto-based Gallo Winery.

Craft distillers say they’ve tried to work with the groups blocking their bill to address their concerns, but they have gotten nowhere.

In the meantime, Steller, the El Dorado Hills distiller, has already started pulling back on shipping bottles to his customers because the Legislature won’t budge.

“I don’t want to keep putting money into a program that’s going to get yanked,” he said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.