“The realistic near-term effect is not that guards are replaced,” Enrique Lopezlira said. “The human role is going to be pushed toward those hardest, higher-stakes parts of the work.”

Recent federal and state Medicaid cuts are expected to double the state’s uninsured rate, causing 2.2 million people to lose insurance by 2030. Low-income patients who rely on public insurance programs like Medicaid — Medi-Cal in California — will be hit hardest, but people with commercial insurance will feel the effects too.

Social Security isn’t just a “safety net” for the elderly; it is California’s economic bedrock. In 2024, the program injected almost $138 billion into our state—more than the gross domestic product of California’s computer and electronics manufacturing sector, and more than double the economic output of the motion picture and television industry and agriculture.

Does fraud explain the increase in CA’s IHSS spending? No, says Laurel Lucia: “IHSS spending has grown rapidly in recent years due to the increased need for home care among seniors and individuals with disabilities, and increased home care worker wages.”

“I knew it was going to be bad, but seeing the projected uninsured rate doubling was shocking to me,” said Miranda Dietz, director of the Labor Center’s healthcare program.

UC Berkeley’s Labor Center projects that more than 1 million Medi-Cal enrollees in L.A. County could lose coverage by 2028, while county estimates show as many as 1.5 million Medi-Cal beneficiaries could be at risk once new federal work requirements take full effect on January 1, 2027.

The problem is not a shortage of people who could become guards, Lopezlira said, but an inability to retain workers in a job that pays a median of under $19 an hour, where nearly 43 percent lack employer-sponsored health coverage.

“I think it’s a retention crisis,” Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Labor Center’s Low-Wage Work program and coauthor of the report, told Business Insider.

Enrique Lopezlira appeared on KQED Forum to discuss our new report finding security guards face a high risk of injury and death on the job and are more likely to be underpaid and undertrained for the work they’re expected to do in stores and hospitals, schools, and office buildings.

The idea for the Displaced Oil and Gas Workers Fund grew out of the abrupt 2020 closure of the Marathon Refinery in Contra Costa County. Marathon gave employees just 60 days’ notice and prohibited them from transferring to their other refineries, according to a 2025 report by the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

While big companies are responsible for the largest share of aid recipients, Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the UC Berkeley Labor Center, said smaller firms in the same industries often have the same wage models.

Because insurance plans don’t operate in a conventional market — employees are generally limited to plans chosen by their employers — price competition is weaker. Lawsuits, however, can act as a substitute for market pressure, Rhee said. Fees have fallen dramatically since the early 2000s, when the first excessive fees cases were brought, she added.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center reports that the average family premium in California reached $28,397 in 2025, growing faster than inflation and wages. The Office of Health Care Affordability aims to curb spending growth by setting a 3.5% target for 2026, but challenges remain as healthcare costs continue to outpace income growth.

Some 3 million Californians, including 250,000 Orange County residents, are projected to lose coverage by 2028 as a result of policy changes from H.R. 1, last year’s massive federal tax and spending bill, and the state budget, according to a report released earlier this year by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

According to research by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and UC Berkeley Labor Center, hundreds of thousands of the region’s workers and residents are in jeopardy of losing Medi-Cal coverage or experiencing reduced benefits by 2028, as a result of policy changes in the federal H.R.1 Trump spending plan.

A new study has shown exactly why this debate matters: According to researchers at UC Berkeley, just 34% of California’s low-wage workers receive health insurance through their own employers, compared with 69% of higher-wage workers.

Call center nurses at the health giant said workplace surveillance tools and AI prioritize speed and cost savings over quality and safety.

To help workers keep pace with rising costs, several California cities have once again increased their local minimum wages.

If adopted, the fair share bill is estimated to raise as much as $8 billion annually and the billionaire’s tax is estimated to raise $20 billion each year over its five-year span, Laurel Lucia, MPP, deputy executive director of programs at the University of California-Berkeley Labor Center, told The Nation’s Health.

The choice of California to apply work requirements to state-funded Medi-Cal recipients “doesn’t really live up to the rhetoric from state officials about trying to implement H.R.1 in the least harmful way possible,” Miranda Dietz said.