(While we’ve been busy crashing the gates of the party, health care and budget issues are rolling along. This is a good little update. – promoted by bolson)

(I composed this for the broader orange audience – let me know if this is too redundant here)

Sen. Sheila Kuehl, the author of the state’s most popular universal health care proposal, nicely waltzes through the Schwarzenegger plan, and leaves no doubt that it’s a patchwork that won’t, in the end, fix a thing.

Kuehl’s key points after the jump.

1. An individual mandate guaranteed to leave millions without insurance.

The central basis of the Governor’s plan is simply to mandate that every Californian must, by law, carry health insurance. There is no requirement that it be affordable and no minimum coverage. This means that the requirement can be met by a bare-bones policy covering only catastrophic events, with a $5,000 deductible and up to $7500 in out of pocket expenses for all the things that aren’t covered by the policy.

This is not universal health insurance. Think for a moment about automobile insurance. Even before Prop 103 passed, limiting the amounts by which insurance companies could raise your auto insurance premiums to those approved by the Insurance Commissioner, we all had to have auto insurance. Would you call it Universal Auto Insurance? 25% of Californians don’t comply […]

Healthcare wonks immediately notice that those uninsured people will just get paid for, expensively and inefficiently, by the rest of the system, by you and me.

2. The employee mandate is nonsense. It only covers 20% of businesses – those with 10 or more employees – and only asks business who opt out to pay for less that half of the cost of insurance. This ham-handed version of a mandate contains the worst of worlds, it continues to let bad bosses skate, and it encourages small employers to reduce payroll. Worse still, this mandate caps employer expenses but shifts 100% of cost increases to employees.

3. Scope. Unbelievably, the plan does not set a floor for minimum benefits.

4. The cost containment farce. Who needs cost containment when you let insurers cut coverage?

5. Screw the poor. The plan costs many families more than the current MediCal cost sharing system does. Parenthetically, this is just one more body blow to a system that structurally unsound. Now reimbursements are so  low, most pediatricians refuse to see MediCal kids – they can’t, since reimbursements are around half of actual office expenses.

These are the high points, but go read the rest. It’s the template we’ll be using to fend off another Schwarzenegger big budget disaster.

(Cross-posted from The Courage Campaign also at MyDD)

Leading up to the November 7 elections, Arnold Schwarzenegger came out strongly against Proposition 90, which you’ll recall was an anti-government regulation measure masquerading as eminent domain reform. In the process he positioned himself to the left of his own conservative Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, Tom McClintock, who was strongly advocating FOR 90.

To make this maneuver, as I wrote then, Arnold cleverly used conservative talking points to make the progressive case for NO on 90. In his statement opposing 90, Arnold railed against wasted tax payer money, frivolous lawsuits and more government intrusion into our lives, conservative bogeymen all.

When my Republican uncle told me on election day that he had voted against 90, I knew it was going down and I came to appreciate the potential value Arnold holds for progressives.

More over the flip…

a. When Arnold takes our position he gives it credibility

As a moderate Republican or, as he would call himself, a "post-partisan public servant," Arnold has the benefit of instant credibility when he takes the progressive position, because noone can accuse him of adopting it for political reasons. You've seen this phenomenon with McCain over the last few years; when a Democrat would criticize Bush on the war, for example, he would be deemed a partisan Bush-hater yet when McCain would do it, perhaps even using the same rhetoric, he was labeled serious and independent-minded. It was bullshit but it sure worked against Democrats in 2004. At this point McCain's maverick status has been pretty well debunked but Arnold very much has that aura about him, especially post-November.

We can see this phenomenon in action on the healthcare debate. As many on the left who have plenty of criticism for Arnold's healthcare proposal have said, the mere fact that we have a Republican advocating for "universal healthcare" (no, his plan is not universal and yes it is quite flawed) is huge because it gives the entire premise instant mainstream credibility. Chris Matthews put it well on Hardball yesterday:

MATTHEWS:  You know what?  You know what, fellows?  I think we‘re on the verge of a national health care plan.  You know why I think so?  Because the middle is moving…Romney and Schwarzenegger.  It‘s not just Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

Like it or not, Arnold has had a hand in moving the debate to where it is now. As Juls puts it in the comments at Calitics:

We are staking out the concept of universal health care and mandatory employer contributions as the middle.  That is a huge change from where this debate was last year.  Framing the debate this way helps not just Californians but the rest of the country.

Which leads us to the other way in which Arnold can benefit progressives: the unique way he communicates our position.

b. Arnold normalizes the progressive position by putting it in terms Republicans can relate to

As I mentioned above, Arnold made it OK for Republicans to vote against Prop 90 despite the fact that the talking points for 90 tapped into conservative fears of eminent domain, another HUGE bogeyman of the right. I have no doubt that his framing of the issue as the correct position for those who want to reduce government intrusion in our lives as well as frivolous lawsuits helped push No on 90 over the top in November.

Arnold is doing the same thing within the healthcare debate.

On This Week With George Stephanopolous on Sunday, this is how Arnold defined universal healthcare:

What we want to do is eliminate the hidden tax. Right now the 6.5 million people that are uninsured are being covered by all of us that are insured.

Message: against taxes? against freeloaders? then you should be FOR universal healthcare.

In addition, look at the way he frames his desire to cover children of illegal immigrants:

This is not like I say should we cover them or not cover them. By law, by federal law, it's very clear that no patient can be turned away from an emergency room if they need care…They are by law already insured so let's not argue about that.

I mean, is it me or is Schwarzenegger channeling Stoller?

It's been clear for some time that America already has a universal health care system, it just works through pushing costs to states and localities and shunting people to emergency rooms where they die faster and their care costs more.  Once we accept the framework that American taxpayers already pay for health care coverage for everyone, we just do it in the worst way possible, the argument changes from 'should the government pay for health care' to 'who's ripping us off'.

Arnold's strategy of selling universal healthcare to the anti-tax, anti-freeloader, anti-immigrant crowd has the added benefit of normalizing our messaging for us, which will only benefit the pro-universal healthcare position in the long run. So yes, there is an upside to Arnold. We just need to make sure that elected California Democrats exploit Arnold’s “new middle” messaging when it benefits us and challenge it fiercely when it doesn't.