On October 14, the 2023 California Legislative Session came to an end. This year, over 800 bills were chaptered into the California State Code. Of these bills, many will impact young adults in the state starting in 2024.
Although this legislative session proved to be challenging, we have fought hard to make progress in health care, higher education, and workforce and finance.
This year, we brought young adults to the California State Capitol to advocate for a range of issues, including guaranteed income, student debt, and the California Earned Income Tax Credit. We have continued to work in partnership with advocacy organizations to make progress in all of our issue areas.
Our Wins
Our fight to expand economic opportunity for young adults is not possible without collaboration, community, and young adult power.
We thank our partners who have worked alongside us, provided us with guidance, and opened space for young adults to amplify their voice throughout the legislative session.
Ensuring that our state does not tax student debt cancellation. Our work, in co-leadership with the Campaign for California Borrowers Rights, saw success when the California Senate and Assembly prioritized student borrowers by incorporating state tax exemption for student debt cancellation, which includes Biden’s one-time cancellation and a host of debt forgiveness programs. Governor Newsom signed the exemption as one of several early budget action bills. While this exemption is set to sunset in 2025, we will continue to advocate for its permanence. Click here to learn more about this bill.
Ensuring continued support for students that struggle to meet Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) standards by removing barriers to maintaining financial aid and maintaining institutional support. Click here to learn more about this bill.
End harmful ambulance billing practices by prohibiting consumers from being charged with out-of-network fees for emergency and non-emergency ground ambulance services. This bill also protects uninsured individuals from being charged inflated ambulance rates by capping the bills to the Medi-Cal or Medicare rate. Click here to learn more about the bill.
OPPOSE: Restriction of oversight on health care merger. We successfully opposed the effort to severely restrict the Attorney General’s ability to conduct oversight over health care mergers. This effort would have placed significant harm on rural communities whose hospitals are frequently on the services chopping block. To learn more about this bill, click here.
OPPOSE: Changes to the number of times a student can retake successfully completed courses. This bill would have removed the limits on the number of times a student can retake a successfully completed course. This effort would have had significant impacts on students’ financial aid, and increase the likelihood of reliance on loans. While the bill is well-intentioned, it held the potential to harm students’ ability to complete their college coursework and retain financial aid throughout. To learn more about this bill, click here.
Continuing the fight
With the many changes this legislative year, including a budget shortfall that is much steeper than originally anticipated, we have faced some legislative challenges, including a stall on our institutional debt and guaranteed income bills.
Institutional Debt: The Protecting Students from Creditor Colleges Act would have shed light on practices that have gone under the radar for far too long. Institutional debt, or shadow student debt, is any debt that is owed directly to a higher education institution. Current harmful debt collection practices include:
- Colleges selling debt to third party private debt collectors that harass borrowers
- Applying for the Franchise Tax Board’s Interagency Intercept Collection program that garnishes tax credits and returns to pay back the debt
- Ban students that owe institutional debt from re-enrollment
- Withhold degrees from students that owe institutional debt
To learn more about what institutional debt is, please review our one-pager here. While the bill was slated to start at the Assembly Higher Education committee, opposition from the CSU Chancellor’s office as well as other higher education institutions pushed the bill to a standstill.
We believe that this issue, which affects more than 750,000 Californians, is an important one and we will continue this fight in early 2024. It is critical for us to build momentum and show opposition to shadow student debt, which is currently at $390 million and growing. If you would like to share your support or experience with institutional debt, please contact: sarah.bouabibsa@younginvincibles.org or fill out this form.
Guaranteed Income: The California Success, Opportunity, and Academic Resilience Guaranteed Income program would have provided 15,000 graduating high school seniors with five months of a guaranteed income as they transition from high school to college or employment. The statewide program would have served our most vulnerable students and ensured that the over 70 percent that intend to continue on to higher education are able to without extreme financial hardship. We will continue this fight in the 2204 Legislative Session to bring relief to thousands of California students that continue to graduate into adult homelessness.
Expand affordable health care coverage to all Californians, regardless of immigration status. Currently, 600,000 undocumented Californians are barred from accessing health care through the Affordable Care Act Marketplace. This leaves hundreds of thousands of individuals without proper access to health care and roughly 100,000 having no choice but to purchase health insurance directly from brokers are exorbitant prices. While this bill did not continue on this year, make no mistake, we will be working with our partners in the Health4All Coalition to maintain the efforts in 2024.
Increasing the CalEITC minimum from $1 to $275. While the legislative bill aiming to secure this increase has stalled, the fight is not over. The California Senate has committed to increasing the CalEITC minimum to $275 – this is a huge step for young adults, especially as the CalEITC is one of the very few financial relief credits that our generation can take up. While the Governor and Assembly have not named this increase as a priority, we believe that there is room for the Senate’s efforts to lead the way in early 2024.