ABx11 Fails, LA Times laments

Keep Focus on Health Care

Once legislators stop blaming each other for the failed state plan, they can try again.(comments in red)
LA Times Editorial
January 31, 2008

Once again, Sacramento has failed California.From misdirected water bond talks to lip service on redistricting to hopes for a "Year of Education" that will go unrealized to this week's defeat of healthcare reform(Wrong. The legislators stood up to the badly flawed inurance pork plan ABx1 1. This article illustrates the lack of knowledge by the editorial staff on the ecomomics oh health care and health insurance), we are reminded of state government's sad inability to get anything done.

To be sure, fixing healthcare is a tall order -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) join a long list of ambitious public officials who've tried, and failed, to deliver universal care. That they were unable to get ABX1 1 through the state Senate wasn't for lack of trying.(Only 1 Senator of a total 13 on the Senate Health Committee voted yes for this junk insurance bill, which shows you how flawed it was) Fourteen months of intense negotiations forged an alliance of labor, business, consumer advocates, hospitals and even a few insurers to back an imperfect but promising bill.

Recriminations are underway. Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata (D-Oakland), who cosponsored the bill but dropped his support at the last minute, has blamed budget woes. Some backers of the bill speculate that lobbying by tobacco companies and small business (which would have helped fund the plan), as well as opposition from some health insurers, were what really did it in. Nuñez, for his part, complains that ABX1 1 had to compete against pie-in-the-sky calls for a single-payer system(that's what they said about the abolition of slavery for many years), and he has pledged to run such a proposal -- and for that matter, all sorts of legislation that might cross his desk -- through the same extraordinary fiscal gantlet ABX1 1 endured. Ah, yes, that should break the gridlock in Sacramento.

Hopefully Nuñez, whose frustration is understandable, can work through his emotions quickly, because there is still much good that can come of his efforts of the last year. At a news conference Tuesday, flanked by the governor and supporters of ABX1 1, he promised that "this bill is not something we're throwing in the trash." There is already talk of a campaign for staged healthcare reform, which would unroll over the course of two or three years instead of one (and which might benefit if a Democrat instead of a Republican lands in the White House). Concentrating first on providing coverage for children is also an option.(what kind of coverage? insurance coverage, which may indeed turn into insurance pork, or real healthcare coverage? Insurers try to equate the two and obviously this editor at the LA times cannot see the distinction. Of course we support health care for all children but realize, unlike this editor, that if you do not provide health care for their parents the kids will never get signed up. The policy differnce is huge to insurers since children tend to be very inexpensive, which if they can get the government to pick up the tab will lend huge profits to insurers. The better solution is to allow the children to show up as needed at medical clinics and hospitals and sign them automatically up on the spot into a government program, which means that all kids are covered and California doesn't have to waste resources on insurance pork)

Whatever direction the conversation takes, Nuñez and Schwarzenegger should keep the focus on comprehensive reform and the notion of shared responsibility. Their great achievement was forging a broad coalition for change. Their greatest failure would be letting it disintegrate.(ABx1 1 was schlock and if passed would set the bar so low for health reform that it would have set the national health reform movement back by a decade. ABx1 1 was 1) insurance pork that had no cost controls 2) was not universal 3) vastly expanded the individual policy market enormously through the "invididual mandate". The individual policy market is the most costly administratively of any of the health insurance markets and sets the wrong example by maximizing insurance pork and minimizing healthcare to those who need it most. The solution is SB 840 or as a temporary measure expanding public insurance only and not wasting any more public resources on private insurance)

Even children's healthcare advocates, who would gain tremendously if the talk turns to their cause, seem to understand this. One such advocate said he "just couldn't believe that these guys didn't get this done." He said he still had hopes for a comprehensive reform bill. He seems willing to put his interests aside -- at least for a little while -- for the greater good. Why can't our elected officials?