Why is the Governor Hiding the Cost of his Plan from California Families?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Emily Clayton

Over the last 48 hours, everyday Californians and community leaders joined together in front of the Governor’s offices around the state to discuss the Administration’s unaffordable healthcare plan and call for real, affordable reform.

Labor groups, consumer groups, health advocates, seniors, communities of faith and many others have worked extremely hard over the last year to achieve real health care reform – affordable healthcare – for Californians. Those efforts were rebuffed when the Governor vetoed AB 8.

Now, the Governor has recycled his January proposal and reintroduced a plan that poses untold costs for California families. Those costs are not just untold in the traditional political hyperbolic sense. The Governor’s plan literally does not tell people how much they’ll have to pay in order to comply with his requirement to purchase health insurance.

The reason for this is relatively simple. When you mandate people to buy insurance, you’ll have a lose-lose situation in defining what the minimum insurance is. If you define it as a high deductible health care plan, the premiums can be made somewhat affordable, but the coverage itself is meaningless without paying $5,000-$10,000 a year in deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs. If you define it as a low deductible comprehensive plan, the premium costs go off the charts. So the Governor has to choose between forcing people to buy coverage they can’t afford to use (high deductible plans) or coverage they can’t afford to buy in the first place. Either way, Californians are left holding the bag.

Instead of tackling the very real issue of affordability and quality of coverage, the Governor’s plan kicks the can down the street a bit further and pushes the hard decisions off a bit longer. Under his plan, the decision of what constitutes minimum coverage will be decided by a single state official who is accountable only to the Governor. In the mean time, Californians are asked to cross their fingers and write a blank check for future health care costs.

At the same time, everyone else seems to have their costs penciled in. Employers will pay between 0-4% of their payrolls, hospitals will pay 4%, drug companies will pay nothing. Why aren’t everyday Californians afforded this same courtesy? After all, our family budgets are a lot harder to balance at the end of the month than the bottom line of highly profitable pharmaceutical companies.