Some of these items may have been covered here, some not, but I didn’t get to post a lot throughout the week, so here’s some fresh meat (apologies to CMR) for those interested in Golden State politics:

• Last week the LAT reported on the rise of private prisons as an answer to crises like the overcrowding situation in California.  Of course, the last private prison in the state I can remember, the city lockup in Seal Beach, had to be closed down because it WASN’T MAKING ENOUGH MONEY. 

• Meanwhile, Robert Sillen, who’s overseeing the prison health care system after a federal judge threw it into receivership, got a somewhat favorable writeup in the New York Times.  Sillen is going a little outside the boundaries of his mandate to improve the facilities for prisoners, including going outside state budget requirements.  He also spoke a little truth:

Mr. Sillen says California politicians are reaping what they have sown. He attributed the state’s prison problems to tough-on-crime lawmakers who made political hay out of sentencing laws that filled the state prisons without expanding either the facilities or their services.

He has a standard diatribe concerning the criminal justice system that includes issues like the neglect of poor neighborhoods and the lack of alcohol treatment programs.

“I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for the politics,” Mr. Sillen said. “No one gets elected in Sacramento without a platform that says, ‘Let’s get rid of rapists, pedophiles and murderers.’ “

• Which is why it’s doubtful that two bills soon to be on the Governor’s desk that would create independent sentencing commissions with the ability to modify sentencing laws will be signed.  Schwarzenegger is as wedded to the tough-on-crime myth as his Republican pals, and he thinks that privatization, along with building on credit, is the answer.  None of those measures attacks the problem at the root, however, which is why we’ll be back here in five years.

• I attended the press event where the Speaker announced legislation aimed at stopping oil industry market manipulation on a variety of fronts.  Turns out those bills have been denuded, and I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with all that oil money pouring in to the CDP and various legislators, including the Speaker himself.

• Another bill that appears unlikely to be signed by the Governor is Sen. Perata’s bill that would put the occupation of Iraq to a vote in Feburary 2008.  Backers of this bill think they have squeezed Schwarzenegger, and if they jump on the result then maybe they’ll get something out of it, but reasonable people agree that this is a meaningless feel-good measure that would have no impact on actual policy, and the Governor can merely say that those interested in ending the war already have a voice in Washington, call your representatives, etc.

• There is supposedly something in the works on health care reform, another closed-door deal mandated by a forced-bottleneck process that results in a Big 5, Little 116 state government.  I wonder if the 30 million-plus citizens NOT represented by Sens. Perata or Yacht Boy Ackerman, or Asms. Nuñez or Villines, feel valued by such a process.  As for the actual bill, it’s apparently a mix of approving the plan now with the funding (including fee hikes) in a ballot initiative later.

• There’s also a redistricting ballot initiative in the works.  Hey I’ve got an idea, how about we have an election a week and “let the people decide” everything!  Wouldn’t it be so democratic, to run a nation-state based on 30-second television ads?? (also, people redistrict themselves, this measure will end up being FAR less spectacular than everyone believes, and also the political map has changed in 8 years, and the gerrymandering itself is not a good enough reason not to contest everywhere, it’s just a convenient cop-out that allows the CDP to unilaterally disarm.)

I’d better stop writing before I get myself in more trouble…

Seems like a great deal of things are happening on the health care front, but I don’t think any of them point to significant reform in this legislative session.  In fact, people are trying to scramble for alternatives.

Dan Weintraub has a feature on Fabian Nuñez’ attempts to get through to the Governor that the other side of the aisle is simply not interested in compromise.  As Julia noted the other day, Nuñez will put the Governor’s plan up for a vote tomorrow, and nobody will vote for it.

The speaker says he intends to package the governor’s plan as legislation and present it to the Assembly, where it will surely die. In fact, Núñez said, his own vote for the bill, which he will cast as a “courtesy,” will likely be the only support the governor’s plan receives.

“I’m going to take him from the stratosphere, and I am going to ground him,” Núñez told me in an interview in his Capitol office. “He needs a little grounding. Nobody likes his plan.”

I don’t know how the Governor is going to respond to this, but clearly observers aren’t thinking it will end in sweetness and light.  They’re making other plans.  over…

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg is floating a plan to cover all children as a fallback reform should nothing else materialize.

“We ought to achieve comprehensive health care reform, but our first priority must be children,” Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said Wednesday at a Capitol news conference to tout children’s health care.

Steinberg’s Senate Bill 32 and a companion bill, Assembly Bill 1 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would expand the children’s Healthy Families Program by increasing the household income limit from $51,625 for a family of four, or 250 percent of the federal poverty level, to $61,950, or 300 percent.

But there’s currently no funding in the legislation, which would require the state to spend $225 million more annually to cover the estimated 800,000 children without insurance in California.

Any legislation would have to be approved before the Legislature adjourns Sept. 14, unless Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calls a special session.

“If our bills become the vehicle (for health care changes), they will be amended to include a funding source to either fund the full amount or at least a significant start for year one,” Steinberg said.

Obviously, there’s no chance of this happening without S-CHIP expansion, which the Governor is trying to get the President to authorize.  Children’s healthcare is cheap and saves the state money in the long run, along with being simply the right thing to do.  But it’s a small step, not the big change that Californians want.  The Governor is opposed to a piecemeal approach, for the record, but could he really veto children’s health care?

To that end, a couple unlikely partners are looking to the ballot box for an eventual answer.

In 2004, the California Restaurant Association led the successful effort to repeal SB 2, which would have required employers to provide health insurance to their employees. On the other side of that multimillion-dollar battle was the California Medical Association and organized labor.

Labor and the CMA are both heavily engaged in the ongoing Capitol negotiations, while business groups have rejected both the Democrats’ and the governor’s proposal as untenable. But the restaurants’ proposal may serve as a starting point for negotiations for a possible November 2008 ballot initiative, just in case a deal cannot be hammered out this year.

“We are not ready to give up on current legislative proposals, but are interested in hearing what CRA has to say,” said CMA’s top lobbyist, Dustin Corcoran. “As a longtime proponent of universal health care, CMA welcomes any serious effort to reform health care and looks forward to further discussions.”

But Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association, said his members are “moving forward as if the Legislature has already concluded its business.” Condie said, “It appears the Legislature is incapable of producing needed reform, so we decided to look to the initiative process.”

I don’t know whether this is serious or just an attempt to put pressure on the Legislature to get something done.  The CRA is floating an 1% increase in the sales tax to cover the cost of health care, that’s really all the details that have come out.

This might be just chaos before everything actually fits into place and a deal is brokered.  I’m not seeing that, however.

Today’s column in the LA Times takes the Governor to task for his unconscionable cut of homeless services that were working and saving money, in favor of a tax loophole for Dick Ackerman’s yachting pals.  Lopez has spent lots of time on the streets of Skid Row, and gotten to know the homeless people that struggle to survive down there.  One of them, Bill Compton, died Monday, and it’s grimly ironic that this happened at the same time that the program inspired by his successful move off the streets had its funding cut.

Bill Compton’s Project Return helped pave the way for AB 2034, which, until its funding was cut by Schwarzenegger last week, was keeping nearly 5,000 people off the streets of California with a smart mix of housing and all the necessary support services.

The governor’s staff has argued that the program can be funded with other revenues, such as money from the voter-approved Mental Health Services Act (Proposition 63). But state Sen. Darrell Steinberg, who introduced AB 2034 when he was in the Assembly, said the latter ploy is both illegal and a subversion of voter intent.

“I was sick to my stomach for two days,” said Steinberg, who believed until last week that the governor would be on his side, particularly since the program has substantially reduced hospitalization, incarceration and criminal justice costs for its participants.

For exciting yachting news, the flip…

Lopez then visited the Marina del Rey yacht club and did a little reporting about what was kept in the budget at the expense of getting homeless people off the streets:

If the governor was looking for savings, he could have taken his scalpel to an estimated $45-million tax break for purchases of yachts, planes and RVs.

To find out just how the break works, I called a yacht company in Marina del Rey. A sales rep told me I would have to buy the boat outside of California, but there’s a loophole available in that regard. Technically, he said, if I took ownership of the boat three miles off shore, I’d be out of the state.

In other words, if I wanted to buy a $100,000 sailboat, I would sign the contract at the shop in Marina del Rey and then navigate around the tax bite with a little vacation.

“We would effect delivery out of state, three miles out, with a hired skipper who would take you out,” the salesman explained. If I then sailed down to Mexico for 90 days, I’d avoid the sales tax of $8,250.

That’s roughly the cost, Van Horn told me, of keeping someone in the AB 2034 program for a year, if you count the matching Medi-Cal funds.

May Bill Compton rest in peace.

This is why Dick Ackerman – and Arnold Schwarzenegger – deserve the certificate of merit for being rich and not homeless.  The creativity with which they engineered yet another tax cut for the wealthy while dismissing those who are in vital need of help must be recognized with some sort of award.  There will be a special place in the afterlife for those who put this together.  I won’t say where.

I’ve said a number of times that if the Governor was serious about health care reform, he needed to follow the lead of other Governors and demand that the President reverse his decision to both veto S-CHIP expansion and make it nearly impossible for states to help provide health care to as many children as possible by putting onerous new eligibility requirements on the states.  I’m pleased to say that he has followed through on one of these goals, and today Schwarzenegger and Gov. Spitzer of New York write to the President.

The federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is proposing new rules that will set Medicaid and state programs back forty years. These rules, which are being promulgated without proper review, impose eligibility standards that would both deny health care to vulnerable children and pregnant women and greatly restrict the flexibility of states to reach your administration’s stated goals of efficiently providing coverage. The rules must be withdrawn […]

California and New York cover more than 1.4 million children and pregnant women using State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) funds – nearly one out of every four SCHIP recipients in the country. We have a long and productive relationship with CMS in leveraging SCHIP to innovatively provide maximum benefit with minimum resources.

We agree with your push for states to be a force for change in the delivery of health care to tens of millions of our fellow Americans who remain without meaningful coverage. But as you rally governors to do more to help fix our broken health care system, your administration has repeatedly modified existing Medicaid and SCHIP rules, harming states’ capacity to help you achieve our shared objectives.

The recently proposed SCHIP rules will reverse longstanding agreements with the states and reduce the number of children who receive health care. We strongly urge you to reconsider these recent policy changes, which simply diminish state flexibility.

Caring for children really isn’t a Democratic or Republican issue.  The Bush Administration wants to have it both ways, shirking the responsibility for health care onto the states while making it impossible for the states to carry out such a mission.  The White House has an ideological obsession with not allowing this successful program to be expanded; then people might think they can actually receive health care from a government program they pay for in taxes.  The horrors!  Good for the Governor on this one.

Dan Weintraub notes that legislative leaders are meeting today with the governor about the future of healthcare reform.  Here’s his thumbnail sketch:

The Republican lawmakers have been pretty clear about their opposition to mandates and taxes, which both the Democrats and the governor have as the centerpiece of their plans. But if you leave the Republicans out, then a pay-or-play employer mandate appears to be the only option that can pass on a majority vote, and the governor says he opposes that narrow approach. It looks as if they are going to have to regroup and think about taking the issue to the ballot with a different tax structure, no employer mandate and a broad coalition of support…

We know that Sen. Perata has been subdued about the chances for anything happening this year.  And we know that anything resembling a fee will be written off by the no-new-taxes Republicans, even when the governor is attempting to rally support for a fee structure that allows hospitals to get federal money for every dollar they put into an insurance pool.  The other major stumbling block is the fact that Republicans and business interests will almost certainly sue the state over whatever proposal is passed into law, either for violating the ERISA statute that prevents states from regulating employer-based plans, or for imposing fees on businesses that would require a 2/3 vote in the legislature.  That will happen no matter what gets passed, and yet nobody talks about it.

over…

(To me that’s a good thing; employer-based healthcare ought to be severed in favor of something more flexible and more portable.  Otherwise more of the problems will exist with people not feeling able to leave jobs because they need to keep their insurance.  You also get this annoying tactic of resisting a truly universal system by arguing “If my employer doesn’t give me dental care, nobody should have it.”  Employers may need to pay into a system, but it should not be employer-based; that’s a relic of a system from the 1940s, and it’s bad for employees and competitiveness.)

It’s clear that the eyes of the nation are upon California as they attempt to deal with the healthcare crisis.  At precisely the right time, the Census Bureau reported a major increase in the nation’s uninsured, to 47 million, including 600,000 new children.  As I’ve said for a while, if the governor really wants to pass something this year he needs to speak up about the effort to cripple any effort at S-CHIP expansion, which is something his health care proposal relies upon heavily.  Today New York Governor Eliot Spitzer came out strongly against this morally misguided blockage by the Bush Administration to insure all children; Schwarzenegger has had little to say on this since June, when he called it one of his top federal priorities.

The prospects for a legislative solution are very up in the air right now, so anyone that believes reforming the system must begin now might want to apply some pressure on their represenatives in Sacramento.