Edit: I'm not arguing against Single Payer, I'm just surprised that this is something so shocking an article was written (and then upvoted) about.
However, when you consider that people are no longer paying for health insurance there's a large pool of money available.
CA needs somewhere between $50-100B to fund this project. The population of CA is around 39M (https://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&...). That means, you need about $2,564/person/year. Or about $214/person/month.
If you compare that figure to the average health insurance cost for people in CA everything starts to look possible or reasonable.
Of course, there's still some massive political hurdles to get over. But the money is out there.
Per person numbers like the ones you included are basically meaningless, given they bear almost no reflection of the actual fiscal implementation and unique issues it would create.
Alexander Tyler nailed the broader issue of 'democracy' long ago:
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the public treasure. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship."
The entire rest of the western world would indicate that it's cheaper than the current system, better too.
If you don't pay for private health insurance you get public coverage (but you have to pay an increased tax).
If You read some of the above comments, you'll see that the money is already coming from "somewhere", that Medicare and Medicaid already cost more than what Japan spend per capita, or that $400bln may be half of what is currently being collectively.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14398948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14398974
Which California—Democratic majority notwithstanding—is hardly short on.
And those are exactly the people this Sac Bee headline is aimed at.