Employment Development Department

They're not great, but they're not the state of California.

If I bought my insurance through the state of California, it would be like dealing with EDD.

which doesn't answer the phone, doesn't answer emails, sends billions of dollars to criminals.

People who are supposed to get money from EDD can't get it because the criminals are taking all of it.

And you know, you know if the state of California was in the insurance business, it would be run like EDD.

I have no interest in that.

And I'd also add this.

I have no confidence, even if this thing passed, that California would be able to administer it correctly.

Yeah, ask anyone who was supposed to get EDD during COVID what they think.

Yeah, I do.

Look, to me, what has been really obnoxious about this whole campaign in California, if you want to argue that trickle-down economics...

But the company, whatever it is, it's called

EDD.

Yep.

And I always read it as like erectile dysfunction dad or erectile dysfunction dick.

than anywhere else and it keeps going up because the state won't pay back its loan, which is another thing that makes it impossible to do business here.

And correct me if I'm wrong, Randy, but the stolen money from EDD during COVID was the largest theft in the history of this country.

I

have to imagine because the number they throw around now is between 30 and $50 billion.

The state has done this themselves as well.

Whether you want to talk about the fraud that's at Medi-Cal, you want to talk about the rampant fraud that we saw during COVID when EDD was given out ridiculous amounts of money to criminals and not giving it to the people who legitimately needed it.

And that, of course, was something that was brought up years before COVID in an audit that, hey, our system is ripe for fraud and nobody cares.

Nobody cares because it's not their money.

Usually, I think it comes from eligibility verification lapses.

We had the same problem with the Employment Development Department during COVID.

We decided to suspend verification of eligibility for recipients.

And when we did that, the geniuses in state government decided to advertise the fact that we weren't checking eligibility.