2026 California Corruption Over the Years Elections Good Shepherd News Media - Truthful News Health Journalist Mid-Term Elections Money / Finances Politicians Politics Top Stories United States 🇺🇸

Marni von Wilpert: Socialist Spending in a Moderate Disguise

ByThe Truth News

October 24, 2026 #a Moderate Disguise, #Marni von Wilpert,#Socialist

Opinion · Election 2026 · CA-48

Marni von Wilpert: Socialist Spending in a Moderate Disguise

She says she isn’t a socialist. Her health care agenda says otherwise — and families who already pay their own way would foot the bill.

By Philip Zullo, Publisher · Good Shepherd Media · October 23, 2026

You already pay for your health care.

Maybe you write the check yourself every month. Maybe you took a job partly because the company offered a solid plan. Maybe you run a small business and cover your own workers because it’s the right thing to do and it keeps good people around. However you got it, you earned it.

Marni von Wilpert wants you to pay for someone else’s too. And she wants you to believe that doesn’t make her a socialist.

The San Diego City Councilmember faces Republican Supervisor Jim Desmond on November 3 for California’s 48th Congressional District, the seat Darrell Issa is leaving. It is one of the most-watched House races in the country. And health care sits at the very center of her pitch.

What She’s Actually Promising

Strip the campaign slogans away and read what she has told interviewers. Von Wilpert says she would fight to protect Medicaid and Medicare and restore funding for reproductive and preventive health services. In a May interview with East County Magazine, she called for restoring Medicaid funding and the Affordable Care Act tax subsidies, funding Planned Parenthood, and making sure “everyone has access to healthcare.”

Notice the word that keeps coming up: restore. Restore funding. Restore subsidies. In plain English, that means more federal spending. And federal spending is your money.

Here is what just one piece of that agenda costs. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that permanently extending the enhanced ACA premium tax credits — the subsidies Democrats created in 2021 — would add about $350 billion to the federal deficit over ten years. That’s one line item. It doesn’t count the Medicaid dollars or the rest of the wish list.

“Free” health care has never been free. It just moves the bill from one person’s tab to yours.

Actions Define You, Not Labels

Von Wilpert has gone out of her way to tell reporters she does not agree with the Democratic Socialists of America’s platform. She campaigns as a moderate. Some outlets even describe her as a pro-Israel centrist running a safe, conventional campaign.

Fine. Then judge her the way we judge anyone in public life: not by what she calls herself, but by what she wants government to do.

Anyone can say anything. A candidate can swear up and down she isn’t something. The honest test is simple: What does she want taxpayers to pay for, and who gets the bill?

Take money from the people who earn it. Run it through government. Let bureaucrats decide how it gets spent. That is the socialist belief system — no matter what name is printed on the yard sign.

Today’s Democratic Party has figured out that the word “socialist” polls badly in swing districts. So candidates in places like CA-48 stopped using the word. They did not stop pushing the policies. The disguise changed. The agenda didn’t.

Big Government Money Builds Big Medical Bureaucracies

Follow where taxpayer health dollars actually go. They don’t flow to your family doctor. They flow to the giant hospital networks and HMO systems that already dominate Southern California.

Those systems hire armies of administrators to process government reimbursements, chase paperwork, and manage compliance. Those administrators are well paid. And they are the ones who end up deciding which treatments get approved, which specialists you’re allowed to see, and how long you wait.

The more government money pours into the system, the bigger and more powerful those bureaucracies grow. Patients get less say. Doctors get less say. The paper-pushers in the middle get more.

That’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s what happens whenever one giant payer starts writing the checks: the people who handle the money gain the power.

Your Own Plan Means Your Own Choices

Compare that to coverage you buy yourself or get through your job.

You pick the plan. Your employer competes for workers by offering better coverage — it’s part of the paycheck, and good companies use it to attract and keep good people. If the plan is bad, you switch plans. If the employer is cheap, you switch employers.

That is choice. That is competition. That is the pressure that keeps quality up and keeps insurers honest.

Every dollar Washington pours into expanding government-funded programs tilts the field further away from that model and toward one-size-fits-all care, run by people you will never meet and can never fire.

The Hidden Tax on Rent, Food and Supplies

Here is the part the campaign ads leave out. When government spending grows, the cost doesn’t stay politely in the health care column. It spreads.

Businesses pay more in taxes and compliance, so they raise prices.
Landlords pay more on every front, so rents go up.
Suppliers pass their higher costs down the line to everyone who buys from them.
Families see it at the grocery checkout, at the gas pump, and on every bill that hits the kitchen table.

And who takes the hardest hit? The people already carrying their own weight. The self-employed contractor. The small business owner who covers his crew. The family paying premiums out of pocket. They pay once for their own coverage, again through taxes for everyone else’s, and a third time through higher prices on everything they buy.

In San Diego County, where housing and living costs already push families out of the state, that’s a burden people simply cannot absorb.

You pay once for your own coverage. Then you pay again in taxes. Then you pay a third time at the register.

Washington Knows Exactly What It’s Buying

If you want to know who a candidate will answer to, look at who’s paying for the campaign.

Von Wilpert leads the fundraising race with about $4.5 million. On top of that, more than $6 million in outside money has poured into CA-48 — more than almost any other House race in California — and nearly all of it is backing her. National Democrats named the district one of their “Districts in Play” months ago. After the primary, she even changed her slogan to “Take Back Congress.”

That’s not a local candidate running on local issues. That’s a national party buying a seat. And a seat bought by Washington answers to Washington.

What Her Supporters Will Tell You

Her backers will say the subsidies keep low-income and self-employed people insured, and that fewer uninsured patients means fewer expensive emergency-room visits that drive up everyone’s premiums. They’ll point to the CBO’s estimate that extending the credits would insure millions more people.

Ask the obvious follow-up: insured by whom? Every one of those policies is paid for by somebody — and that somebody is the taxpayer who already bought his own. If government spending were the cure for high health costs, decades of rising federal health spending would have made care cheap by now. It hasn’t. It has made the bureaucracies bigger.