Troubled health care bill up for vote today
Tom Chorneau, Chronicle Sacramento Bureau
A yearlong legislative effort to overhaul California’s estimated $190 billion health care system and provide coverage for millions of uninsured residents is likely to die quietly today, barring a dramatic intervention from state Senate leader Don Perata.
Although the bill has the support of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles, it has stalled before the state Senate’s Health Committee, where it appears to be at least one vote short of passage.
The 11-member committee is scheduled to consider the measure today, and the bill needs six votes for passage. Four Republican members of the committee are not expected to support the plan and two Democrats – committee chair Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, and Leland Yee, D-San Francisco – have said they do not back the bill.
As the president pro tem of the Senate, Perata, D-Oakland, has significant power to force the bill out of committee and on to the full Senate floor. But the problem, lawmakers and pundits said, is that the sweeping health care bill may not have any better chance of passage before the full Senate.
“I don’t know of any member of our caucus that is wildly in support of this bill,” said Yee, whose surprise public opposition to the measure last week signaled the bill’s likely downfall.
Yee opposes the bill because of the potential risks to taxpayers who probably would be the source of bailout money if costs exceed projections. He also believes a mandate to have insurance could prove too expensive for families forced to buy policies on the open market.
Hailed as the most comprehensive effort in the nation to provide near-universal health care, AB1X would require all Californians to have insurance while mandating employers to provide coverage and greatly expanding government programs to serve the poor.
The plan, which would require voter approval, relies on a variety of fees and taxes – including a $1.75-a-pack increase in the tax on cigarettes to help fund a state purchasing pool for extending coverage to as many as 6.8 million uninsured residents.
But a critical report from the nonpartisan legislative analyst last week concluded that the program presents billions of dollars in risks to taxpayers if the architects of the plan have miscalculated the cost of providing care to the uninsured. (more…)
Now remember not too long ago I brought up part of California’s State Controller’s audit documents that said the following:
“It costs $3,850 per year to provide health insurance to the average California worker. CDCR spends $7,000 per inmate per year on healthcare.”
“There’s no way to sugarcoat these findings,” Westly said. “The State pays twice as much to provide health care to a prisoner as it costs to insure the average California worker – and the State has very little to show for it. We have to stop pouring millions of dollars down a bottomless pit and fix this system.” (more…)
I wrote more about it here in the post ‘This is what ‘change’ looks like for the state of California’.
Universal healthcare and all of its clones has been one of the central themes for Democratic presidential candidates. While I would concur with Tom Epstein’s point (vice president of public affairs for Blue Shield of California) when he stated in the article that this blow would have been far worse if it was rejected at the polls, politicians on both sides who are not willing to back this proposal show that they already anticipate some push-back from citizens–especially when you take an over $14 billion budget deficit into consideration.
IMO, this is just the writing on the wall when any national attempts to do the same thing. Unless there is a plan out there to seriously cut the deficit WITHOUT deepening it again with new social programs, this will be the same fate of this plan on a national level.
