As Health Bill Dies, California Activists Turn to Single Payer Bill

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Jesse Douglas Allen-Taylor

Advocates of single payer health insurance in California are saying that the collapse of the Nuñez-Perata-Schwarzenegger health care bill is a good thing and are moving forward with reviving their own single-payer legislation.

“We were opposed to the Nuñez bill,” Vote Health representative Kay Eisenhower said by telephone this week. “We considered it a step backwards.”

Vote Health is an Alameda County-based health care activist organization.

Eisenhower said statewide single-payer health care advocates will be holding a two-day conference in Los Angeles later this month to talk about ways to put State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s (D-Santa Monica-Los Angeles) SB 840 single-payer health care bill back on track. “SB 840’s not dead,” she said. “It’s only on ice.”

Two years ago, it seemed dead. After SB 840 passed the state legislature in 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

Kuehl revived her single payer bill a year later, and the bill passed the Senate on a 23-15 vote and the Assembly Health Committee on a 12-5 vote last summer, but it stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee as attention in the Assembly turned to a compromise bill being put together by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez.

The bill’s summary says it “would establish the California Universal Healthcare System (CUHS) under which all California residents would be eligible for specified health care benefits. The CUHS would, on a single-payer basis, negotiate for or set fees for health care services provided through the system, and pay claims for those services.”

The year 2007 began with promises from many legislative sources to expand health care coverage in California, with State Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland), Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles), Gov. Schwarzenegger, and State Senate Republicans all putting up individual bills or proposals. Eventually, Perata and Nuñez consolidated their two bills into one, ABX1 1, which won Schwarzenegger’s backing.

In contrast to Kuehl’s single-payer system, which would set up a state agency through which all insurance premiums and claims payments would be funneled, ABX1 1 would have required that all California residents “enroll in and maintain at least minimum creditable health care coverage … for themselves and their dependents,” but would continue to allow independent insurance companies to manage the actual coverage itself.