Let’s get the particulars out of the way.  I’m dday, in the real world I answer to Dave Dayen, and I, like hekebolos, am running for CDP (California Democratic Party) delegate this weekend.  In fact, there are over 20 progressive bloggers running for CDP delegate slots all across the state.  My district, AD 41 (the fightin’ 41st), stretches along the coast from Santa Monica all the way up to Oxnard.  There’s a map here.  The 41st AD caucus meeting is on Saturday, January 13th at 10 a.m., at the Malibu Library, located at 23519 Civic Center Way (Mapquest it).  If you or someone you know is a registered Democrat in my district, I’d be honored to have you (or them) vote for me and the entire Progressive Slate.  The full details are at this DFA link.

But what I want to tell you about is my experience last night, where I gave the first campaign speech of my entire life, and how I have the blogging community to thank for the results.

So MoveOn.org is doing this “Mandate for Change” campaign, where members get people in their community to sign “photo petitions”.  Instead of just signing a petition asking for bold leadership on major issues (Iraq, health care, clean energy, restoring democracy through election reform) and sending it to your Congresscritter, in this campaign people are asked to take a picture holding up a personal message for their Congresscritter.  Then we’ll hold personal meetings with the Congresscritters or their staffs and hand-deliver the photos of their constituents asking them for change.  It’s a nice little idea.  Here’s a flickr photo set of hundreds of these photo petitions.

My local MoveOn chapter (yes, they have chapters now) held a meeting yesterday to discuss the photo petition project.  I’ve been fairly active in this campaign and with this particular chapter, so I attended.  I also printed up a bunch of flyers about my election on Saturday to distribute to the group.  We ended up having about 35 people at the meeting.

I actually had a separate role to play at the meeting, to lead the discussion about the latest part of the Mandate for Change campaign, which is a drive to write letters to the editor (not astroturfing, but ACTUAL grassroots action!).  So I went ahead and discussed that, and gave my thoughts on how to get a good LTE published (key point: less use of the phrase “ignorant MSM fuckhead” increases chances of publication).  And right after that, the meeting organizer said, “And Dave also has something exciting that you can get involved in this weekend, and that’s his election for CDP delegate.  Care to tell us about that?”

This wasn’t totally unexpected, but also not expected to the extent that I prepared anything.  But in a way, I’ve been preparing since roughly 2002.  This community and the progressive blogosphere is an incubator for ideas and framing and ways to relate your message.  I knew why I was running (in fact, I wrote about it right here).  The California Democratic Party is an invisible institution that comes around for two weeks every two years and places election ads.  Other than that, they’re a nonentity.  Here’s what I wrote then:

I’ve lived in California for the last eight years.  I’m a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority.  But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me.  Neither do its endorsements.  The amount of people who aren’t online and aren’t in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I’d peg at about 95% of the electorate. 

I mean, I’m a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party.  I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved.  They don’t.  The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads.  The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace.

And this has a tremendous impact.  The state of California is hardly deep blue.  It’s had Republican governors for 80 out of the past 100 years.  The last time the Democratic Party meant anything to California’s citizens was in the time of Alan Cranston and Pat Brown in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Democratic Club movement began, and when the state party was most involved with the grassroots.  At the time, the party was committed to progressive values and offered a real politics of contrast to move the Democratic brand in the state forward.  This has receded in the past 30 years.

But it’s actually worse than all that.  The Republican Governor of this state is getting a lot of publicity this week for submitting a universal health care proposal that essentially says: “I won’t rest until everybody in this state is paying for really crappy coverage!”  The plan doesn’t go far enough in addressing cost containment, forces people to buy insurance without defining what “basic coverage” is, provides a cheap opt-out of providing coverage for employers, and basically maintains the same system where greedy insurers get rich off the backs of the citizens of this state.  Most solid progressives, like my state senator Sheila Kuehl, understand this.  There are only two figures statewide who have had nothing but good things to say about the governor’s proposal.  They are Don Perata, Democratic leader in the Senate, and Fabian Nuñez, Democratic leader in the Assembly.  It’s a curious way to negotiate.

That’s because the state party and its top officials are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo.  They have incumbency protection through redistricting, are slathered with special interest money by being in the majority, and have no desire to upset that apple cart.  This is EXACTLY why membership in the CDP is slipping.  They work around the margins and do generally a decent job, but they have no leadership on the big issues, and no connection to the grassroots progressive movement that attracts ordinary citizens and lets them know that the Democratic Party is working in their interests.

So it’s with this as background, that I began to say a few words about the election.  And it became entirely clear to me that I was actually making a campaign speech.  I was talking about the need to build a movement from the bottom up and not the top-down.  I was talking about how the national agenda is important, but what happens in your own backyard really matters, especially in a state like California, which oftentimes sets the agenda for the rest of the nation to follow.  I was talking about the need for bold, progressive leadership, to make the CDP more responsive, more effective, and more relevant.  I was talking about the Governor’s health care proposal and how we need a credible alternative.  I was talking about how we had to wrest the party away from the narrow-cast, special interest-driven agenda of the current leadership and return it back to the people, about how we have to compete everywhere in the state and not just where we have large majorities.

And I realized that I have written about all of these things at one point or another.  I’ve internalized the concepts and sharpened my dialectic to a knife’s edge.  I’ve tried arguments, seen them rise or fall, seen people agree or disagree, and tried them again.  I’ve been running this speech through in my head since I first discovered blogs in 2002.  It came out so naturally and easily, that I have to conclude that the blogosphere is the greatest primary campaign that any candidate has ever experienced.

Now, this was a friendly audience made up of MoveOn members.  But I’m fairly certain that a bunch of them had about as much of a relationship to the CDP as most of the rest of the state, which is to say none, before that speech.  But before I even got around to saying “I’d like your vote, and I have some flyers here with all the information,” one of them asked, “How can I get involved?”  Then another.  They were really interested in the process and surprised that they didn’t know about the election at all.  I sent around the flyers and got commitments from a bunch of people to come out and vote.

(I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that one of the people at the meeting was a fellow colleague on the Progressive Slate, Ellis Perlman, a retired political science professor with an incredible array of knowledge about state politics, and a desire to see change.  He spoke as well and he was fantastic on giving the history of grassroots movements in the state, and the need to check runaway executive power – sound familiar? – with a robust legislature committed to offering real alternatives.)

Upon leaving to go to the crappy night job I have this week (I didn’t get home until 5:30AM last night, so forgive me if this is rambling), I reflected on how this speech and this moment changed me.  In a way it was both a culmination and a beginning.  If we’re ever going to change America, all of us need to understand that democracy demands participation.  Online activism of the “I did something for the movement!  I clicked SEND!” variety is nice and all, but it’s ultimately insufficient.  I’m comfortable with public speaking but not necessarily with being a leader.  But what I took away is that we all have the capacity to lead, to call for change, to be a part of this progressive movement all across the country.  All it takes to do so is the will.  You can create the opportunity.

OK, so Ezra Klein is the second very smart person to look at Governor Schwarzenegger’s health care plan and say that it has community rating within it.  So I’ll grant that it’s in there.  That’s a positive step, and let me say that moving toward a universal health care system is also a positive step.  Klein looks at the details, however, and doesn’t find a lot to cheer him.

On the flip…

That said, it’s got some problems: The subsidies are too stingy, and the minimum required coverage — a very high deductible plan — isn’t nearly coverage enough. The Wyden plan, by contrast, subsidized up to 400% of the poverty line and demanded benefits equal to a Blue Cross standard plan — a barebones but still protective insurance package. The worry here is that insurers will compete by offering the least coverage for the cheapest price, and Arnold’s plan doesn’t do enough to stop that.

4% is better than that $6 and some pocket lint (or whatever) that Massachusetts is assessing, but still much less than what actual insurance costs. So there are worries as well that the 4% payroll tax on businesses will actually be an incentive to avoid offering coverage, given that businesses providing health insurance actually pay much more than that (even Wal-Mart pays more than 7%). Business folk will tell you that the difference between companies offering coverage and those shirking the responsibility is currently 7+% vs. $0, so this will actually close the gap significantly. That may indeed be true. But whether it brings other businesses up or gives corporations currently offering insurance a superficially ethical way to drop their coverage is yet to be seen. This, of course, leads into a fundamental problem with the legislation: Its preservation of the immoral, unjust, and unwise employer-based health system. The proposed bill preserves what should be destroyed, and it doesn’t bring insurance, as the Wyden plan does, into a more controllable, coherent structure through which efficiencies can be wrung out and future cost control mechanisms implemented.

So in the end, this is much better than anything I expected a Republican governor to come up with. It shifts the conversation left, includes some critical and serious components (mainly community rating), and actually does forge a serious path towards universal health care. That said, it is not a progressive reform proposal, and should not be mistook as such. It’s not generous enough, it preserves the employer-based system, doesn’t demand comprehensive basic coverage, and retains the problematic incentives wherein insurers and businesses can compete to lower costs by reducing coverage. So while it’s much better than the status quo, it isn’t even in the ballpark of ideal.

RJ Eskow is in general agreement with this assessment, doing a list of winners and losers and seeing that the insurance industry and large employers have a lot to gain.  That sounds like a plan that’ll help people!

I don’t think it’s necessary to bend over backwards and say how positive it is that a Republican governor is talking about insuring all the citizens of the state.  That they haven’t up until now is an indictment.  You don’t give somebody a reward for staying out of jail, that’s what this rush to praise seems like to me.  Details matter, and who benefits matters as well.  Under Arnold’s plan, fixing his broken leg would cost $55,000 – and not everybody has his money.  Without cost containment, you’re just giving everyone in the state the same really shitty health insurance they have now, if not worse.  And it puts the state in a major hole that they’ll have to tax businesses to dig out of.

It’s clear to me that the Democratic leaders in the state aren’t all that interested in challenging the Governor and trying to work toward a goal of single-payer universal health insurance.  I’m not sure where progressives turn to best impact the debate.  Sheila Kuehl, chair of the Senate Health Committee, seems a likely ally.  But the Democrats need to remember one thing: they have no pressure to actually deliver on health care reform.  The Governor does.  And passing a bill just to say they passed a bill is bad politics and horrible policy.

(This is my personal opinion on the subject, others may differ. The Governor’s proposal is so expansive and desperate to be liked that there’s something for everyone to praise and denounce. – promoted by dday)

OK, I think I’ve read every possible news report about the Governor’s health care proposal, and I’m still confused.  Why exactly is this called “universal care”?  It doesn’t ensure that everybody is covered, it demands it.  That’s not universal care, that’s a universal threat.  And while I agree with Ezra Klein that even single-payer health care is a universal mandate in that it uses required taxes to fund health care, applying that mandate without cutting down costs for consumers makes this a fantasy, as Ezra explains.  On the flip…

The question with an individual mandate is subsidization and affordability. If we pass a law levying an individual mandate and subsidizing premiums down to $50 a month, there’ll be few complaints. A mandate with no subsidization, however, is an impossible burden on millions of families. When evaluating an individual mandate, that’s where liberals need to focus: The generosity of the subsidies. The Wyden Plan, for instance, subsidizes up to 400 percent of the poverty line. The Massachusetts plan subsidizes up to 300 percent. The Schwarzenegger plan subsidizes up to 250 percent. That looks too low, and I’ll talk more about it later today.

I look forward to seeing that, Ezra is very good on this issue.

This plan is very reflective of the Governor’s newest persona as a post-partisan.  What makes it ultimately unsatisfying and potentially dangerous is that it lacks the same thing the Governor lacks: core beliefs.  Instead of trying to jerry-rig all of these different ways to find the money so that everyone in the state has a low, vague level of health care (if I read this right, under this plan my premiums would go up and my coverage would go down), why not step back and try to lay out what the end goals are?  I believe that health care is a right and not a privilege.  I believe the money spent on health care today is enough to fund a successful, robust system where people get quality care, doctors and hospitals make money, and the public at large is generally healthier.  If that was the goal, you wouldn’t continue to perpetuate this myth that employers have an obligation to make sure their employees are healthy.  On this score I completely agree with the LA Times editorial board:

The problem is this: It makes no sense to legally and permanently make Californians’ access to healthcare dependent on their employers. Companies hire workers and pay them for their time, talent, muscle and brains. Employers must meet certain standards to do business in the state – complying with workplace safety laws, paying the minimum wage, providing workers’ compensation insurance, etc. But they should not become the primary mechanism for the state to deliver vital services to citizens.

This is more true here than elsewhere because so many Californians who need insurance have only marginal or temporary relationships with employers. Companies, meanwhile, face plenty of challenges just staying in business and keeping up with the dynamics of the modern marketplace without being saddled with a new health insurance tax.

What ends up happening, and would still happen, is that people would stay in dead-end jobs because of their health insurance, because the subsidies wouldn’t be big enough to justify the poor care and the cost of going it alone.  And American companies are less competitive because they stand alone in bearing the burden of health care.  And taxing companies who opt out of paying for employee health care by 4% of profits is a pittance compared to actual health care costs for companies.  You’ll end up with a de facto state-run health care system with no possibility to rein in costs.  The cost-containment strategies, mainly HSAs and telling people to join a gym, are laughable.  Employers can’t provide health care and compete in a global marketplace, and the state cannot fund health care without keeping costs down.  The plan does neither.

(Never mind the fact that a key point of funding this mish-mash is by taking $2 billion out of the public health system.  The funding aspect of this is almost totally ridiculous.)

Another core belief of mine is that no plan should keep in place and largely intact the for-profit insurance system which, through greed and dirty dealing, benefits from its own stinginess in denying care and trying to eliminate the sick from their rolls.  The Governor’s plan would be the greatest thing ever to happen to the private insurance industry.  It would give them four or five million new consumers, who they would be required to provide with care.  That’s a positive step, but it does nothing to contain costs for those consumers based on age or occupation.  Insurance companies can jack up rates that Californians MUST pay.  How’s that for a license to print money? 

The CNA has a very good roundup of this plan which I urge you to read.  And I’m pleased with the reaction of Art Pulaski of CalFed.

“While the Governor’s healthcare proposal includes some positive elements, it is the wrong prescription for California’s health care crisis. This proposal will be a boon to insurance companies, but a bust for most workers. This plan requires all Californians to buy health insurance with no guarantee that it will be affordable or that coverage will be adequate. We are concerned that the plan creates an incentive for employers who currently provide health care to drop coverage and instead pay only a minimal tax.”

That’s it in a nutshell.  And I really hope that Democrats in the Legislature, who were very nearly effusive in their praise of this strategy, wake up and figure this one out.  Perata and Nuñez are pretty much alone in their support.  Is this tactical?  If so, it’s the worst tactical maneuver I’ve ever seen, and calls into question what their goals for health care really are.  It doesn’t seem to be changing a broken system.  It doesn’t seem to be making health care affordable for everyone.  It doesn’t seem to be doing anything but making insurance companies rich.

This is a very Republican program in that it puts the risk and burden of health care, largely, on individuals.  Just like moving pensions to defined contributions from defined benefits, just like proposals to privatize Social Security instead of keeping it protected, just like “free trade” causes job insecurity for the vast amount of America’s workers, the message to individuals is simple: YOYO.  You’re On Your Own.  That’s what this proposal is for Californians. 

In Shum’s diary she referenced a post from Avedon Carol that I thought was a great way to understand the current health-care debate in California, and would provide a valuable lesson for Democrats in the state.  I’d like to highlight it.

Many of us have been talking about the need for Democrats to start high before going to the bargaining table. This is not a radical new idea – everyone knows that when you dicker for a good price, you don’t start with the “reasonable”, “compromise” figure.

But Democrats seem to have lost the idea of haggling. If they want single-payer healthcare, they ask for single-payer healthcare. (Or worse, they do what the Clintons did and try to offer the insurance companies something, which kills the whole idea.) If they want a minimum wage of $7.25, they ask for a minimum wage of $7.25 […]

I want single-payer to pass, but I think single-payer would sound much more reasonable if there were people out there demanding a fully-socialized healthcare program like Britain’s NHS (as Nye Bevan designed it, not the anemic thing successive governments have been turning it into). Go all-out: Demand an NHS, and single-payer will sound nice and capitalist and moderate – as it is.

Avedon is absolutely correct.  You don’t give up the battle before it is even joined.  If politics is the art of compromise, then compromising BEFORE you reach the bargaining table is a guarantee that you won’t be able to get anything near wht you really want.

Especially when the opposition is ALREADY bargaining into your position, albeit with fits and starts.  On the flip…

The governor has proposed covering all children, including those in the state illegally by circumstance (the number of which seems to be either consequential or not, depending on who you ask).  It’s cheap to cover children and immoral not to.  As a starting point, I’d take this plan over the Massachusetts Mandate plan any day of the week.  But, what’s important here is, as Kevin Drum notes,

Details are murky so far, but I don’t think the mechanics of Schwarzenegger’s plan is what’s important anyway. What’s important is that two of the Republican Party’s highest-profile governors have now publicly endorsed the idea of universal health coverage for their states. In other words, some kind of universal, or semi-universal, healthcare has now been established as the rightmost bound of the healthcare debate.

Democrats should understand what this means: (a) universal healthcare is no longer some lefty fringe notion, and (b) the plans from Schwarzenegger and Massachussetts’ Mitt Romney are now the starting point for any serious healthcare proposal. Any proposal coming out of a Democratic policy shop should be, at a minimum, considerably more ambitious than what’s on offer from these two Republicans.

It’s important to understand who’s under pressure to deliver on health care.  The public knows that we pay more for health care in America and receive less.  They are almost unanimous in supporting governmental solutions to providing access to affordable health care.  And the governor has made health care his signature issue for 2007.  It was a big part of today’s coronation, and it’ll be a major part of next week’s State of the State.

If health care reform doesn’t happen in 2007, the governor will be blamed.  Bottom line.  And understanding this, he’s already moving toward a position that Democrats in the legislature can accept, with universal coverage for children.  In fact, this is to the LEFT of Don Perata’s proposal which excluded illegals.

It’s absurd, as Drum says, for Democrats to do anything but push for something far beyond an on-the-margin proposal out of the box.  Yet this is exactly what Perata and Fabian Nuñez have done, claiming that they were putting something together that the governor could accept.  This belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the art of the deal.  If you believe that health care is a right and not a privilege, you start from the position of covering everybody in the state, and then compromise.  As it stands now, the middle of this debate would include HSAs and partial employer mandates, and essentially a reaffirming of the private insurance system that’s making everybody sick to their stomachs.

Business, which has a firm grip on the legislative joystick, hits the panic button at talk of single-payer healthcare or universal healthcare, and it hauls out its own boogeyman phrases, such as “job-killer” and “drag on the economy.”

I’ll tell you what’s a drag on the economy. Healthcare insurance that’s impossibly expensive, or impossible to get. If the United States wants a vital economy of personal enterprise and risk-taking, then it needs to guarantee health coverage, period. Americans are willing to take chances in business and careers, but not with their families’ health, or their own.

Dan Luke is an Oregon insurance broker. He told me that he runs into this “all the time – people staying in jobs they don’t like. People have dreams about going into business for themselves that they can’t fulfill because they don’t want to lose medical coverage, and they can’t pay a lot of money for [individual policies] even if they are healthy.”

I gave him a professional for instance: Say there’s a man who wants to switch careers, start something on his own. He’s 59, married, four kids, comes to you for health insurance. He smokes cigars. (“Mmmmm,” I heard Luke say.) And he had heart-valve surgery almost 10 years ago.

Luke stopped me right there. The man would never get coverage. I didn’t even get to ask Luke about the risk factors of riding motorcycles and skiing.

My “for instance” is Arnold Schwarzenegger. If the governor weren’t a rich man, if he were just a guy with a bold idea who wanted to give it a shot, as Schwarzenegger did when he abandoned acting for governing, he couldn’t get health insurance. He’d be stuck in his old job instead of bringing something new to the economy and to his life.

That should be the philosophy guiding any baseline proposal on fixing health care.  Otherwise there’s no need for the Democrats to come to the bargaining table at all.  They might as well let the governor write the policy.  It’s time to figure out the haggle and try to get something the people want, rather than what they wrongly believe is politically possible.

(I wanted to bump dday’s post on this back up. If you are running, put a comment in on the thread. In some of the big districts, there will be plenty of competition. In others, not so much. Also, if you are in one of those districts, go attend and support your fellow Calitics readers! – promoted by SFBrianCL)

I am running to be part of the Democratic State Central Committee (DSCC) in the 41st Assembly District of California.  The election’s in ten days, and yesterday I joined with 11 other Democrats to agree to run as a bloc called the Progressive Slate.  The goal is to make the California Democratic Party (CDP) more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in the state.  And the Progressive Caucus is at the center of efforts to reform the state party in California.

I want to explain the reasons why I’m running, and a little back of background about this race, and finally how you can help.

I’ve lived in California for the last eight years.  I’m a fairly active and engaged citizen, one who has attended plenty of Democratic Club meetings, who has lived in the most heavily Democratic areas of the state in both the North and South, who has volunteered and aided the CDP and Democratic candidates from California during election time, who (you would think) would be the most likely candidate for outreach from that party to help them in their efforts to build a lasting majority.  But in actuality, the California Democratic Party means absolutely nothing to me.  Neither do its endorsements.  The amount of people who aren’t online and aren’t in grassroots meetings everyday who share this feeling, I’d peg at about 95% of the electorate. 

I mean, I’m a part of both those worlds, and I have no connection to the state party.  I should be someone that the CDP is reaching out to get involved.  They don’t.  The only time I ever know that the CDP exists is three weeks before the election when they pay for a bunch of ads.  The other 23 months of the year they are a nonentity to the vast majority of the populace.

And this has a tremendous impact.  The state of California is hardly deep blue.  It’s had Republican governors for 80 out of the past 100 years.  The last time the Democratic Party meant anything to California’s citizens was in the time of Alan Cranston and Pat Brown in the 1950s and 1960s, when the Democratic Club movement began, and when the state party was most involved with the grassroots.  At the time, the party was committed to progressive values and offered a real politics of contrast to move the Democratic brand in the state forward.  This has receded in the past 30 years.

This is the only reason that I’m running as a delegate; because I want the CDP to be something more than an occasional admaker.  I want to have a state party that is not as in thrall to big money.  I want a state party that isn’t involved in laundering $4 million dollars in corporate money from AT&T to the speaker of the State Assembly as payback for getting a cable and video deregulation bill passed.  I want a state party that actually gets behind Clean Money instead of officially remaining neutral on the legislation because they don’t want to upset their big-money donors.  I want a state party that spends more money on voter outreach and contacts than on a couple ads.  I want a state party that contests everywhere rather than trying to get out the vote in their traditional enclaves.  I want a state party chairman that actually fulfills this agenda instead of paying lip service to it.  I want the CDP to send me an email once in a while, and act like an entity that can make a difference in people’s lives, instead of an umbrella organization for incumbency protection.

The problem is that this is going to be an uphill battle.  The way the CDP works is that its delegates come from three separate sources.  There are the Assembly District caucuses, where 12 Democrats (6 men, 6 women) are chosen to serve as delegates.  That accounts for about one-third of the total delegates.  Another third comes from the County Committees, which is weighted by population for each county.  The final third comes from elected officials in California and nominees for state offices, as well as their appointees.

Obviously, a lot of these are insider positions.  And the only process for adding delegates that’s open to the public, the AD caucuses, is a deliberately closed process.  In fact, the rules have changed.  In 2005, progressives were very successful in gaining seats through the caucuses and becoming delegates.  In response, the CDP completely changed the process.  In 2005, any registered Democrat who showed up at the caucus could stand as a candidate.  Now, you must apply in writing beforehand.  In 2005, the caucus was open to the public.  Now, there’s a $5 POLL TAX to “defray costs of the caucus.”  In 2005, voters heard all the speeches from the various candidates before voting.  Now, they can come to the polling place, vote and leave.  Never mind that practically nobody knows about these elections unless they seek out the information.  That wasn’t good enough.  The new rules set up barriers to entry and make it easier for machine-type political forces to shuttle their voters in for five minutes and ensure their victory.  This is why we are running as a progressive slate; to multiply our power by 12, by ensuring that the people we get out to vote cast their ballot for the entire slate instead of individual candidates.

Only two Democrats in the entire state of California were able to defeat incumbents last November: Debra Bowen and Jerry McNerney.  Both of them harnessed the power of the grassroots and used it to carry them to victory.  They also stuck to their principles and created a real contrast with their opponents on core issues.  The only way that the California Democratic Party can retain some relevance in the state, and not remain a secretive, cloistered money factory that enriches its elected officials with lobbyist money and does nothing to build the Democratic brand, is by building from the bottom up and not the top down.  By becoming more responsive to the grassroots and more effective in its strategy, we can ensure that California stays blue, which is not a given.  This is a long-term process that is in its third year, and will not happen overnight.  But it’s crucial that we continue and keep the pressure on.

As I mentioned yesterday, nyceve has been doing incredible work looking into the crisis of healthcare nationwide.  Today, she highlights a disturbing LA Times story about how insurers in California pretty much refuse to cover potential consumers unless they’re Jack LaLane (and even then, Jack had better not have a pre-existing condition).

Frankly today I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The stupidity. The abject stupidity. And Americans accept this as “normal”?

Perhaps something is wrong with us, with the citizens of the United States for tolerating this crap.

So without further delay, let’s end the year on a high note.

And once again, ask yourselves, if our elected representatives suffered these indignites, remember they serve us , how quickly the for-profit insurance industry scam might collapse.  Do you think they would tolerate such abuse?

In California, if you are say, self-employed (the backbone of the American economy, per George Bush), and you need to buy an individual health insurance policy, in a word. You. Better. Be. Healthy. Period.

This is what the Los Angeles Times is reporting this morning in a front page story. By the way, the reporter, Lisa Girion, deserves a Pulitzer for her ongoing and  extraordinary coverage of the corrupt, cherry-picking health insurance industry in California.

Scott Svonkin joined the Los Angeles County Commission on Insurance 10 years ago because he was concerned about an emerging problem: people losing health coverage. Since then, the ranks of uninsured Americans have swelled to more than 46 million.

Svonkin almost became one of them.

. . .As it turned out, Svonkin was rejected by not just one but three of California’s biggest health insurers, which cited his history of asthma, among other things.

“I couldn’t buy it at any price,” said Svonkin, 40, who lives in Sherman Oaks. “I remember thinking, ‘This can’t be happening to me.’ “

I want to interject here at this point, because I am in exactly the same position as those in this article.  I’m self-employed, living in California, and I have, in fact, a prior history of asthma.  I had to practically beg Blue Cross to take me in 2004 (when I fully went free-lance, and dropped the coverage I had with my employer), and since I have had Achilles tendon surgery since then, I pretty much have to stay with the greediest, sneakiest, most depraved insurer in the nation.  It seems like it’s only gotten worse since then.  As it is, I have high-deductible coverage that doesn’t cover routine things like MRI’s (which I paid completely out of pocket in the summer of ’04).  I can certainly afford coverage that’s better, but at this point, nobody would cover me.  This is well-known to anyone who has to arrange for their own insurance.  I’ve been turned down before, even by so-called “good guys” like Kaiser.  It’s this knowledge, that any prior history will cause rejection, that pushes people to fib on their forms, which Blue Cross uses to its advantage later by dropping people after they make a claim.  Blue Cross doesn’t mind if you lie a little on your form if you pay them; it’s only when you want something FROM them that they’ll drop you.

Consumer advocates see the practice as cherry-picking – a legal form of discrimination that is no longer tolerated in schools, public accommodations or workplaces – and a way to guarantee profits.

“The idea is to avoid all risk,” said Bryan Liang, executive director of the Institute of Health Law Studies at California Western School of Law in San Diego.

Jerry Flanagan, an advocate with the Foundation for Consumer and Taxpayer Rights, said it wouldn’t take much to be left out of the private-insurance market. “A minor asthma condition or a surgery 10 years ago that requires no further medical care is enough to get you blacklisted forever,” he said.

As a result, some people forgo treatment so as not to tarnish their health records. Others withhold information from doctors or ask them to leave details out of their records. For those who are uninsurable, healthcare often is the chief reason they stay in or take a certain job.

. . .Consumer advocates say out-of-date, ambiguous and even erroneous medical information can render people uninsurable. Sometimes the reasons can seem absurd. In a letter to an otherwise healthy recent college graduate, for instance, Blue Cross listed among the reasons it denied coverage a past bout of jock itch, “successfully treated with cream.”

. . .Blue Shield declined to discuss Svonkin’s case, citing patient privacy laws, as did the other insurers that subsequently rejected him, Blue Cross and PacifiCare. Although the rejection notices pointed to various problems – “expectant fatherhood” and swelling from a spider bite – all three blamed his history of asthma, a condition that affects more than 4.5 million Californians.

This is why we MUST have universal health care to prevent this kind of ruthlessness from happening.  For-profit insurance companies have a responsibility to their shareholders and their corporate boards, and the people have no part in that. 

Few mention this, but the American healthcare system is something of a mistake. It blossomed out of a World War II tax reform meant to guard against corporate war profiteering. Liberals, with their usual combination of good intentions and inadequate foresight, imposed massive marginal tax rates on corporations, effectively freezing their profits at prewar levels. But the law had a loophole: Corporations could funnel their wartime riches into employee benefits, such as healthcare, thus putting the cash to use within their company. And so they did, creating the employer-based healthcare system.

But healthcare was simpler in the 1940s, and far less expensive. In the 21st century, it’s not simple at all. Once a perk of employment, health insurance is now a necessity, and a structure that dumps such power, complexity and cost in the laps of employers is grotesquely unfair to both businesses and individuals. There’s no logic to an auto manufacturer running a multibillion-dollar health insurance plan on the side; it should stick to making cars. There’s no excuse for pricing the self-employed and entrepreneurial out of the market. And there’s no reason the owner of a three-employee start-up should have to go to bed with a heavy conscience because his coffee shop can’t pay for chemotherapy.

But health insurance is not only the inexplicable responsibility of business; it is a big business, which is why the system survives. The medical-industrial complex is a massive, remarkable beast, consuming a full one-ninth of the American economy and offering astonishing profits to many of the participants (indeed, Big Pharma was the most profitable industry in the U.S. from the 1980s until 2003, when energy companies wrested away the top spot). As with any lucrative industry, the winners are resistant to reforms, and they have a formidable army of politically lobbyists, PR specialists and image consultants helping to preserve their position, to preserve a mistake.

It’s unconscionable to keep the system the way it is, and I hope Ezra Klein is right, that change is around the corner.  But to go into the buzzsaw that is the present insurance industry is going to take an enormous amount of political will, as well as a grassroots movement to understand the nature of the problem, and why going single-payer is the most rational alternative.  I think Senator Wyden’s proposal, which uses community rating to ensure everybody pays the same price no matter their expected level of care, deserves serious support and scrutiny.  What will come out of California, which will certainly be a compromise, will go a long way to determining what will be acceptable to the nation at large.  We should not lay down our arms for universal health care before those negotiations even begin.  And we should not allow a system to continue where people who can afford quality care can’t get it – because the insurance companies don’t want to take the risk of paying even a dime to care for them.

((this is reprinted, with permission, from a DailyKos diary by nyceve. Nyceve is one of the most astute advocates for universal health care in the blogosphere. You can read her many thoughts on the subject here. California will be a health care battleground in 2007, so it’s important to keep the pressure on. – promoted by dday)

As I write this, the Republican governor of California lies in a hospital bed receiving V.I.P. treatment for a broken leg the result of a skiing injury suffered several days ago at his palatial estate in Sun Valley.

Schwarzenegger to undergo surgery in L.A. today on broken leg
By Peter Nicholas, Times Staff Writer
December 26, 2006

SACRAMENTO – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was admitted to a Los Angeles hospital Sunday in preparation for surgery early this morning on his right leg – broken in a skiing accident in Sun Valley, Idaho, the governor’s office announced.

Schwarzenegger’s orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Kevin Ehrhart, said in a prepared statement that the surgical procedure planned for the governor was “relatively common” and was expected to last two hours.
link

Allow me to contrast the treatment Mr. Schwarzenegger  received to what you or I would get–if we were lucky, and if we had insurance.

Notice the Governor was admitted to the hospital on Sunday, which happened to be December 24th?  Now note that his surgery was actually performed on December 26th–two long days later.

You think you or I would be invited to spend two days malingering in a very expensive hospital bed if we needed orthopedic surgery?

But hey what’s ten thousand here or there, he’s the governor.

When was the last time, you knew anyone admitted to the hospital two days in advance of a surgical procedure? Doesn’t happen–unless you’re a government official–say Denny Hastert, Dick Cheney or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Just sayin.

Mr. Schwarzenegger has said that providing healthcare to the 6.5 million uninsured Californians is a priority. He is promising that the State of the State speech will explain how he will move the Golden State closer to universal healthcare in the coming year.

The Orange County Register, lies at the heart of one of the most conservative regions in the United States, Orange County, California. Hence the series of editorials on the healthcare crisis in California becomes a delightful preview of the right wing noise machine in action. This is but a taste of what’s to come. The smears, fear and deceive campaign against universal healthcare we should expect heading into the 2008 Presidential election.  And today, the venom is directed toward the Republican governor of California.

Universal healthcare will result in huge tax increases and there is already too much regulation of the insurance and healthcare industries:

The governor should avoid any proposal that can be implemented only by imposing new taxes, which always seem to metastasize and never shrink. The current vogue among “reformers” is to tout Massachusetts’ new universal health care law, which originally was advertised to cost “only” $125 million. But soon after its adoption this year, a bond measure revealed the cost to be $276 million instead.

. . .It is the over-regulation of medical professionals, facilities, technologies and health insurance that price quality health care beyond the reach of consumers.link

Universal coverage will cause insurance premiums to skyrocket.

The governor should avoid like the plague any calls to require insurers to accept every applicant, regardless of risk. By forcing insurance companies to insure people they otherwise would not, several states devastated their markets in the 1990s. When this regulation was combined with restrictions on pricing premiums according to risk, it drove “numerous insurance carriers out of the market, and increased premiums beyond the reach of all but the wealthy,” according to “What States Can Do to Reform Health Care,” a recent book published by Pacific Research Institute.

. . .Rather than rely on more federal – or state – taxes, the governor should break away from the Nanny State mindset and work to deregulate the industry so market forces can bring costs under control. As long as someone else pays, the people selling health care, and the people receiving health care always will demand more. When the third party paying for it is the government, there is even less incentive to say “No.”

And most appalling, health care is not a right. And I fear we’ll be hearing a lot about socialism, communism, Cuba and long waiting lines.

Health care is a desirable commodity. But it’s dangerous stuff to elevate it to a “right.”Health care is a “right” in communist Cuba. And that’s one reason Cuba’s economy is abysmal. Health care is a “right” in socialized Canada. And that’s the reason in Canada treatment is rationed, and people must wait months for surgery.

As we all know, the Republican/AHIP lies and misinformation noise machine exists to maintain the for-profit status quo.

Here’s the truth about single-payer health care. You can read everything you need to know on the web site of Physicians for a National Health Plan.  link

Single-payer national health insurance is a system in which a single public or quasi-public agency organizes health financing, but delivery of care remains largely private.

Currently, the U.S. health care system is outrageously expensive, yet inadequate. Despite spending more than twice as much as the rest of the industrialized nations ($7,129 per capita), the United States performs poorly in comparison on major health indicators such as life expectancy, infant mortality and immunization rates. Moreover, the other advanced nations provide comprehensive coverage to their entire populations, while the U.S. leaves 46 million completely uninsured and millions more inadequately covered.

One final thought. I’d like to highlight a comment Elizabeth Edwards made yesterday.

This thread is exactly right (24+ / 0-)

Putting a face on the victims of poverty or racism is so essential. And it is, if I may say so, what John does so well: tell someone’s story, with honesty and compassion. It is what he has been doing for his adult life.

Join me at http://blog.johnedwards.com

by elizabethedwards on Thu Dec 28, 2006 at 01:37:26 PM PST

The reason I mention this is because, like John Edwards, I believe putting a human face on pain and suffering is the way to make the American people sit up and demand change.