((bumped, as reports come in of AB X 1 1 failing 10-1 in committee. In the end, even Don Perata announced that he could not support the bill. – promoted by David Dayen)
It looks like the dream of major health care reform is over in California, at least for this year. The LA Times reports:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s yearlong effort to arrange medical insurance for nearly all Californians will be rejected by a state Senate panel this afternoon, according to people familiar with the decision.
The move would effectively kill one of the governor’s most ambitious policy goals.
Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland) made the decision after canvassing Democratic senators over the weekend and finding almost no support for the measure, which the Assembly passed last month.
There was some thought that Perata would use some parliamentary maneuvers to ensure the bill’s passage, but apparently he couldn’t find anyone to create a majority for the measure.
Anthony York openly wonders whether or not this spells the end of the current leadership structure in the state Legislature.
But watching the California Legislature in action last week felt like watching the end of an era — and bearing witness to the creation of a power vacuum. In a political ballet that played out over several days, the prospects for two seemingly unrelated but intimately connected political issues — a healthcare reform bill and a change in the state’s term-limits law — withered simultaneously. And as their fortunes sank, so did the power of the current legislative leadership […]
Then more bad news for the healthcare bill. Mid-afternoon Wednesday, Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino) announced that she too was voting against the legislation, citing concerns about the affordability of the mandated insurance.After her vote, a senator who sits on the committee characterized the situation as a “total implosion.” He told me that the rumored poll numbers on Proposition 93 were making it harder to get the healthcare bill out of committee. If the prospects for the initiative’s passage were as bad as the numbers suggested, he said, the stigma of a lame duck, and a corresponding loss of influence, might attach to Perata and Nuñez.
Let me say that health care reform may end in California for now, but it does not end nationally, and indeed one has little effect on the other. This is still something in which Americans are broadly in favor. And it’s still a framework that every Democratic candidate has laid out. With a new Democratic President, health care reform will be at the top of the agenda, and at the federal level it has a far greater chance of being fiscally sustainable. There are still significant measures that could be taken in California that would improve conditions, in particular mandating guaranteed issue and expanding public programs. But the perils and pitfalls of balancing an enormous overhaul on an unsteady budgetary picture proved too great.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein, echoing a familiar theme:
I’m not shocked, or even particularly saddened, by this. It never really looked to me like the finances worked out, and though the political coalition around the bill was heartening and impressive, the rabid dead-enders of the Californian GOP (they’re actually worse than national Republicans) wouldn’t allow even a cent of new money, and without a truly stable funding source, you really can’t do this at the state level. Indeed, money is why all these state plans fail. For fiscal reasons, this has to be a federal initiative. Because states are more politically flexible than the federal government, they can often seem a more viable arena for health reform. But the policies always collapse.