Time to Pull the Plug on the Flawed California Health Care Deal

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Donna Gerber
Director, Government Relations
California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee

Comprehensive healthcare reform is a dream that millions of Californians are hoping to achieve. But at some point it’s time to recognize that the steamroller to pass a bill no matter what it contains can actually make matters worse.

That is exactly what happened with the rush to energy deregulation in the 1990s, a grand “consensus” that produced a last minute, hurried bill which few had read and fewer still had considered the disastrous consequences. The result was blackouts, higher prices for consumers, near bankrupting of the state, and the plundering of our resources by Enron and other big corporations.

We should learn the lessons from the energy deregulation fiasco and not repeat our mistakes. Instead, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Speaker Fabian Nunez continue to push the hurried adoption of a “compromise” health plan that will do nothing to end the routine denial of care by insurance companies or stem skyrocketing insurance premiums and other out-of-pocket costs that place Californians in jeopardy of further financial insecurity at a time of a worsening consumer debt crisis or encourage them to engage in self-rationing of care.

With the Assembly posed to vote Monday on the latest iteration of a sweeping bill, it is time to pull the plug. Let’s step back, take action instead on an immediate health crisis and come back next year to enact a better, more comprehensive health reform plan that will actually solve our healthcare morass.

Thousands of California children now face the cutoff of coverage due to the President’s veto of the children’s health program. Further, the governor is expected to propose emergency across the board budget cuts up to 10 percent as a result of the worsening budget deficit. We should all focus on guaranteeing continued coverage for children and protecting current programs rather than rushing through a bad plan that could just exacerbate the crisis for California families and the state.

In addition to serious policy problems with a flawed bill, there is also reason for concern about the process in which the Assembly is being coerced to vote on a sweeping, complex major reform on a new bill, ABX1 1, whose language was only released late Friday.

What does seem apparent is that under this bill health insurance will not be universal, it will not be affordable, it will not be of high quality, and bare bone plans with high out of pocket costs will be forced upon Californians and employers who will have no control over the price.

In short, this bill does not provide health care to patients and their families; ABX1 1 provides “covered lives” to insurers who have already broken almost every moral (and often legal) imperative in the delivery of health care. Who could predict that Health Net could believe that it’s OK to pay its employees bonuses to deny claims by rescinding policies after patients are ill? But that and more is exactly what Registered Nurses see every day while they are tending to the care of their patients.