Can Californians Reason Together on Where We Go From Here on Health Care Reform?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Frank D. Russo

In the wake of yesterday’s defeat in the Senate Health Committee of AB 1X 1—a compromise bill between Speaker of the Assembly and Governor of California—and barring a miracle, California will not see comprehensive health care reform this year. There’s just no other way to make sense out of the bills in the legislative hopper, the negotiations that have taken place in the last year, and sifting through the welter of statements made after the committee’s vote, many of which we will be posting soon in a separate article.

Try as he may, Speaker Fabian Nunez’s characterization of AB 1X 1 as a “bipartisan” bill is illusory, unless bipartisanship means having one Republican (Arnold Schwarzenegger) supporting it and all Republicans in both houses of the legislature (without exception) opposing it. The bill was passed by the Assembly solely with Democratic votes.

Strip all the rhetoric aside consider the fundamentals of how legislation is enacted in California and how they played out with this health bill and any others that will come after it. You need passage by the legislature and a signature by the Governor. Refine that a bit, and include the proviso that anything signed into law can be held in abeyance if signatures are gathered for a referendum—which any powerful interest can secure with a couple of million dollars. Then you have an election on a ballot proposition, where more millions of dollars and negative advertising make it more difficult to get the voter’s approval.

It’s like one of those games where you maneuver a round object through a maze and if it falls through a hole you have to start all over again. As I described the different twists and turns of health care bills this year to my wife, a nurse by training who has followed this issue for decades, she told me that one issue or another was not entirely new and we had been discussing combinations of each since the 1970’s.

We’ve been down this road before in California. With a Democratic Governor, Gray Davis, the legislature passed SB 2 by John Burton, President pro Tem of the Senate in 2002, which would have created a $7 billion system providing health insurance to all working in Californians through their employer. The referendum against that, Prop 72, albeit by a narrow margin, killed it.

While most of the comments from Democrats and Republicans in the Senate Health Committee yesterday were complimentary of the efforts of the Speaker and the Governor—and of the process—there still is a very negative and poisonous residue from the attempt to cobble together a compromise. And I am not speaking of the reactionary forces that are truly opposed to real advances of any sort in the health care field.