A single payer system has been a staple of California progressive political

rhetoric for decades. But it’s not been easy to accomplish in a state where most
people pay for private health insurance through their jobs. In 1994, voters
overwhelmingly rejected a ballot initiative that would have created a universal
health care system. Another attempt passed the state Senate in 2017, but it never
got a vote in the state Assembly.

Questions about how to pay for a single payer system have doomed previous plans. In
2011, Vermont enacted the nation’s first universal health care system in the
country. But state officials abandoned it three years later because they said they
couldn’t afford to pay for it.

Gov. Gavin Newsom promised to do it when he ran for governor in 2018, and voters
elected him in a landslide. But in his first three years in office, Newsom has
focused more on making sure everyone in California has health insurance — a
strategy he said contains “the spirit” of a single payer system.

“When you’re governor, you’ve got to be in the `how’ business,” Newsom said. “I
believe in a single payer financing model. The `how’ at the state level is the
question that needs to be answered thoughtfully.”
Olive trees are sturdy and grow naturally across the Mediterranean region. But
producing the best olive oil means cultivating the best olives — and that’s hard.
The olives have to be unripe enough when cultivated to prevent the oil from losing
its freshness quickly. But they can’t be too ripe either.

Swings in weather patterns — too much rain, not enough rain, frost too early or too
late — all affect the natural growing pattern of the olive, and create uncertainty
for olive oil producers.

Those challenges didn’t stop Giuseppe Morisani and Skyler Mapes from getting into
the business; they are facing the reality of climate change head on.

The pair never anticipated getting into olive oil. Morisani’s parents owned a
seven-hectare farm on the windswept hills of Calabria overlooking the
Mediterranean. Pressing olives and draining them to make oil was, for centuries,
just a part of life for families like his in Calabria, many of them poor.