• Sacramento Mayoral Candidate Kevin Johnson opposes Prop 8. Johnson takes the Obama-squishy approach of saying he opposes writing it into the state constitution, but personally prefers marriage as a man-woman thing.  Incumbent Mayor Heather Fargo, for her part, is a supporter of same-sex marriage, saying of Johnson, that he “made “a good move to oppose Prop. 8. Now we just need to convince him that marriage between gay people is in fact a good thing.”

Zing. This race appears to be quite tight, but a large Obama-friendly turnout in Sacramento would seem to make the former NBA All-Star Point Guard Johnson something of a favorite right now.

• SF League of Women Voters releases YouTube video channel for SF Supevisor candidates. You can get your fill of local politics. There’s literally hours of this stuff. Knock yourself out (and yeah, I’m talking to you Sweet Melissa).

• This is fantastic.  Yolo County residents are fighting the construction of a new prison.  It’s as damaging to build as a new coal-fired power plant for a local community.  No city should be turned into another Prison Town, USA.  There’s a little NIMBYism here, but the truth is that we cannot build our way out of the prison crisis – it begins with saner sentencing and a return to the traditional role of rehabilitation.

• Sheila Kuehl writes an open letter to Gov. Schwarzenegger asking him to sign SB840.  It’s very comprehensive.

• Meanwhile, in a rare bit of good news from the insurance industry, HealthNet will reinstate the nearly 1,000 dropped policyholders whose coverage was nixed after they got sick and tried to use it.  They’re also paying millions in fines and reimbursements.

• Sen. Mark Ridley-Thomas on the subprime crisis and its effect on the state.

By Randy Bayne

The Bayne of Blog

Let me start by saying that I am a supporter of single payer health care. It is the solution that makes the most sense in curing our health care ills and is the only system that offers a long term solution to availability, affordability and access. In short, it is the “gold standard.”

Single payer health care passed the California Legislature this past Sunday. It is a great victory for proponents of universal single payer health care, but was hardly unexpected. All the hoopla over its passage is fine, but now the real work begins — continues really. Single payer is still not law and in spite of all the hopes that Governor Schwarzenegger will have a change of heart and sign SB 840, it ain’t gonna happen. Just as he did last time, he is certain to veto it again this time.

To actually get single payer into law will take a new Governor, a Democratic Governor who supports single payer, in 2010. But then the dynamics change lower down the political food chain.

Legislative Democrats, in spite of their rallying behind SB 840, may not be as staunchly behind single payer as some would like to believe. The cynic in me — a very big cynic — says that this time and last Democrats felt safe voting for the SB 840s because they knew they could please the single payer crowd with their vote without the bill actually becoming law. They had a Republican Governor whom they could count on for a veto. With a Democratic Governor in 2010, who would likely sign such a bill, the legislature, even a Democratic one, may not be so quick to pass an SB 840.

This is my pragmatic view, a view I would like to be wrong.

But if not, we need to continue the hard work of advocating for single payer. We need to assure that Democratic lawmakers will stick with us, those who refuse are replaced with those who will, and we need to win a 2/3 Democratic majority in both houses of the legislature. Most of all, we need to continue educating the public.

I do not mean to diminish what has been accomplished. This year’s passage of SB 840 is a good victory. Ground has not been lost in the debate over single payer. We have successfully defended what we won two years ago. Now, let’s move forward.

AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans, decided downtown San Francisco would be a good place for the health insurance company lobbyists and executives to hold their convention. Not surprisingly, thousands of people will take to the streets at noon on June 19th at the Moscone center to protest getting ripped off by the health insurance companies and rally for SB 840 in California and HR 676 nationally.

One of the key people being protested is none other than former DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe who is a keynote speaker for the industry. Which adds some context to his quotes in yesterday’s New York Times on the Clintons’ enemies list and rewarding of friends:

“The Clintons get hundreds of requests for favors every week,” said Terry McAuliffe, the chairman of Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. “Clearly, the people you’re going to do stuff for in the future are the people who have been there for you.”

Finally, we’ve recovered from McAuliffe’s disaster as DNC Chair when he ran it like the DLC and was proven incapable of moving beyond transactional politics to a post-McCain/Feingold fundraising party that isn’t a subsidiary of special interests. And yes, we’ve also moved beyond his success in perfectly executing a Clinton campaign strategy that took her from undisputed presidential front-runner to junior senator. But there is he is, using his name and connections to help out those who have helped them while Americans suffer.

In my opinion, one of the most important outcomes of Clinton’s loss was that they won’t get back control of the DNC — which is great news for Democrats. But T-Mac is a reminder that we all need due diligence in the process of choosing the next California Democratic Party Chair so that we can reform the CDP to also move into the 21st century.

Currently, there are 1,904 pledged attendees at the rally according to the neat online organizing tool. Check to see which groups have currently pledged how many, get your group involved, and join in this important event.

450 – California School Employees Assn.

400 – California Nurses Assn.

200 – California Alliance for Retired Americans

200 – California Universal Health Care Organizing Project

100 – Cindy Sheehan for Congress

54 – Others

50 – Green Party SF

47 – Health Care for All-Marin

40 – American Medical Student Association

30 – Gray Panthers SF

25 – Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club

25 – United Educators of San Francisco

20 – Amer. Fed. of Teachers, local 2121

20 – Neighbor to Neighbor

20 – West Country Seniors

20 – Senior Action Network

20 – Older Women’s League of San Francisco

20 – Hermanson for Congress

20 – HAT

20 – Green Party San Meteo

15 – California Physicians Alliance

15 – Socialist Action

14 – Health Care for All-Santa Cruz

12 – International Longshore and Warehouse Union, local 6

10 – California Alliance for Legislative Action

10 – Office and Professional Employees International Union, local 3

10 – San Francisco for Democracy

9 – American Postal Workers Union – SF

9 – UC-Santa Cruz students for Single Payer

5 – Chris Jackson for Community College Bd

5 – Young Workers United

4 – Health Care for All-Sonoma

4 – FORUM SF

The California Nurses’ Association called today about the Yamada campaign, and it piqued my interest enough to check out Mariko Yamada and Christopher Cabaldon’s respective endorsement lists. While doing that, one noteworthy pair of endorsements for Yamada came from the California Nurses Association and SEIU United Healthcare Workers West, two unions who have not only been aggressive in pushing for a single payer health care plan for California, but who also stood up against Schwarzeneggar and the 2005 special election boondoggle back when the CA Democratic party was content to sit back and let Arnold run the state unimpeded.

On the issue of health care reform, the candidates are close but not identical. In a recent debate, Yamada backed Sheila Kuhl’s single payer health insurance plan pretty strongly, while Cabaldon gave it lip service, but like the CA Democratic leadership in last year’s health insurance negotiations, also left himself open to a compromise that fell short of single payer. As the Davis Vanguard reported at the time: [emphasis mine]

For Christopher Cabaldon he suggested that everyone is paying for the uninsured, even when we do not see it. He favors the Sheila Kuehl single payer health system as the ideal. However, he then argued that we must do something even it is not a single payer system. We cannot allow the perfect to be the enemy of the possible. Finally he argued that cuts in Medi-Cal are taking us in the wrong direction and it will make it impossible to find Medi-Cal providers who cover the disadvantaged. Mariko Yamada was also supportive of the Kuehl Bill and argued that if her supporter, Phil Angelides had been elected Governor, we would have it as law now. She is also willing to consider others but not as enthusiastically. Talked about the fact that social workers have supported single payer health system going back 50 years, back then, she quipped they were called Communists but now normal people also support such a system.

While Cabaldon has his fair share of union endorsements, the presence of that 2005 special election coalition of SEIU-UHWW, CNA, firefighters, police and teachers’ unions on Yamada’s endorsement list suggests that those unions don’t trust Cabaldon, even though he’s the front runner and as such would be easy enough to endorse. It’s not a matter of liberal versus conservative – both candidates are fairly liberal Democrats, well in the mainstream for the blue 8th AD – but it suggests that the battle over the shape of health care reform between establishment accommodationists and single payer advocates that scuttled the compromise last year is still simmering under the surface, and that CNA and SEIU-UHWW are doing some quiet primary work to try and actually get single payer passed as more than a symbolic bill, should the Democrats get a big enough majority in November to pass it over the governor’s veto.

Or maybe I’m just seeing things.

originally at surf putah

(brilliant ideas – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

In a recent report in the Bee, CA State Treasurer Bill Lockyer brainstorms ways to balance the state budget, including a suggestion that that we consider cutting the UC system off of all public funds, and having “public” universities raise their own funds by – you guessed it – raising student fees. As if the state hasn’t already kicked students in the gut repeatedly by jacking up tuition and fees, turning our public universities into de facto private institutions.

This from the same “Democrat” who proudly said he voted for Schwarzeneggar for the recall in 2003. And a graduate of UC Berkeley in 1965, back when tuition was so low as to be nearly free. But I guess those were different times, eh Bill?

But in a sense, Lockyer is right despite himself. The state infrastructure is woefully underfunded and underbuilt, given our growing population. We’ve got a 25 million person infrastructure in a 37 million person state, and we’re headed towards 50 million in the decades to come. Yet his proposals largely suck. So what else could we do, since we’re in modest proposal mode?

Lest I be accused of mere churlish sniping from the sidelines, I’ll bite:

1. Legalize pot and decriminalize all other drugs, with an amnesty for every inmate locked up in CA jails for the victimless crime of nonviolent possession of drugs. Tax the pot, and use the savings from the criminal justice system + new tax revenue to a) fully fund local addiction treatment clinics and clean needle exchanges, and b) pay down the deficit. Most of the social costs of drug use stem from their criminalization, not the chemicals themselves. Far better to deal with the actual addiction through medical treatment, leave people who can handle it alone, and tell the prison industry and the prison guards’ unions to find another cash cow to exploit.

2. While we’re at it, repeal the 3 strikes law that has clogged our prisons with nonviolent offenders. A new prison costs the same as a new college, and housing an inmate in an overcrowded cell block is around the same cost as educating a student. Instead of slashing public eductaion, why not reduce the % of the California population we’re warehousing?

3. Repeal Prop. 13. If that’s too scary for timid defenders of the status quo, afraid of what Howard Jarvis’s winged monkeys might say in attack ads, why not take a baby step and repeal it just for commercial property? Corporations never die, so why should they pay 1978 tax rates for eternity?

4. Pass SB 840, Sheila Kuhl’s Universal Health Insurance Act, which will remove a huge source of our growing state deficit, namely rising insurance costs for state employees, which effectively funnels budget funds directly into health insurance corporations’ profit margins, at a rate far exceeding inflation. Private health insurance is a huge part of the problem, and removing profit from the equation would help the budget planning process out tremendously.

5. Raise taxes, both income and (if you’re courageous enough) wealth taxes. There’s a ton of big money sitting around in this state, and for all the whinging about excessive taxes, our rates are fairly low compared to most other large urbanized states.

6. Stop borrowing money to pay for programs that could be funded outright; pay as you go with taxes. The “no tax” approach to the state costs us a huge amount more in the long run just on interest payments alone. Some things (infrastructure projects, for example) make sense with bonds and debt financing, but most of the initiative bond measure stuff should just be part of the regular budget. Which brings us to…

7. Change the 2/3 raising tax and budget supermajority requirements to simple majorities. Asking a virulently antigovernment, antitax, anti-public good Republican party rump have veto power on the state of California’s future is just absurd. If they want to dictate terms, then perhaps they should win a majority first.

Will Democrats follow any of these ideas? Probably not, but they’re all better than junking the state public higher eductaion system just to balance the books in the short term.

originally at surf putah

Update: AB 8 Passed the Senate and the Assembly

(Note: I work for the It’s Our Healthcare Coalition which includes member organizations in support of both SB 840 and AB 8).

This morning, Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez and Senate Pro Tem Don Perata held a press conference about AB 8. 

They were joined by supporters of AB 8 such as Count Dracula, the CEOs of all of the major health insurance companies in California, the honorary co-chair of the Schwarzenegger for Senate 2010 committee, and a bunch of people who like to drown kittens. Oh wait, that’s not what happened at all. 

Yet that’s what you might have expected given the rhetoric coming from some quarters. The rhetoric has gotten well beyond ridiculous, and it’s time to stop engaging in bizarre fantasies and the shrill invective and start talking seriously about the healthcare reform debate in California. 

When it comes to debating the merits of AB 8 and SB 840, it’s easy to bash insurance companies and  it’s easy to believe that politicos are about to sell us out on something so vitally important.  But none of that deals with the fact that large elements of the progressive movement are supportive of AB 8 for very legitimate reasons. 

Reasonable people can disagree.  Nobody is compelled to support AB 8.  But to ignore these stakeholder groups and their legitimate interests in seeing healthcare reform this year (much less to demonize them as some have done) is not only bad politics, it’s wrong.

[More on the jump]

First, let’s look at some of the groups who have come out in support of AB 8:

• The California Labor Federation
• SEIU
• AFSCME
• the Unitarian Universalist Legislative Ministry of California
• AARP-California
• California ACORN
• the Latino Coalition for a Healthy California
• Congress of California of Seniors
• AFTRA
• Health Access California

They’re not exactly the Legion of Doom. 

Were AB 8 to pass, it would represent the single largest expansion in health coverage in decades.  It would extend coverage to literally millions of Californians. AB 8 would cover approximately 70% of the uninsured, a tremendous increase over SB 2 (passed in 2003), which would have covered approximately 20% of the uninsured had it not been repealed via referendum (Prop 72) in 2004. 

There is no denying that AB 8 is not universal healthcare.  But there is nobody who is seriously arguing that true universal healthcare, much less single-payer healthcare, will be signed into law in California this legislative session. 

And so those who argue that we ought to withhold support for AB 8 in favor of waiting for something better (e.g. SB 840) are actually saying that it is better to continue to allow people to suffer now and take the risk that nothing substantial will happen for years instead of helping those we can in the interim.

For the 4.9 more than three million Californians who would get coverage under AB 8, the issues are real and urgent, and asking them to wait even another year is asking them to endure the risk of incalculable harm: bankruptcy, preventable sickness and death, harm to themselves and their loved ones.  It is fine to argue that AB 8 does not represent a complete solution to the healthcare problems we face, and I would agree with that.  But absent a strong argument (one that shoulders the burden of proof) it’s simply callous to ask that others be martyred and denied protection based on some abstract political calculation. 

And make no mistake about it, a political calculation is what undergirds all of the arguments against AB 8 from those who will not tolerate anything less than a jump from the status quo to a single-payer system in one fell swoop. 

There is no reason that I have seen offered by supporters of SB 840 to oppose AB 8 in its current form except that a) AB 8 putatively helps the insurance companies by expanding health insurance coverage to more people and b) passage of something now might stymie a change to a universal or a single-payer system. 

THE MOMENTUM ARGUMENT

First, let’s deal with the issue of momentum.  Opponents of AB 8 like the California Nurse’s Association have (amazingly) pointed to the enactment of Medicare as an example of gradualism gone awry, thereby killing momentum for fundamental reform.  RoseAnn DeMaro, the Executive Director of the California Nurses Association, in an article with the inflammatory title of Whose
Life Doesn’t Count? writes:

With public frustration over the collapse of our healthcare system mounting, we have the greatest opportunity in years to achieve fundamental reform. Yet the gradualist approaches would undercut the momentum and squander that opening.

Our most successful national health program, Medicare, also provides one of the best arguments against incremental steps. When Medicare was enacted 40 years ago many contended that the dream of a full national health system was right around the corner.

Four decades later, Medicare has not been expanded. Most of the changes have been contractions – higher out of pocket costs for beneficiaries and repeated attempts at privatization by the healthcare industry and its champions in the White House and Congress.

You follow that logic?  Medicare is “our most successful national health program,” which demonstrates that we ought not to take incremental steps like…the enactment of Medicare.

We know we can help millions of people now. We don’t know whether it is even possible, much less likely, that we will be able to enact more meaningful reform in the next couple of years.  I don’t think that this means we pack up and settle for something short of a solution.  But taking one affirmative step towards a solution does not mean that you can’t take another step later on.  Does anyone really think that enacting Medicare seriously made us worse off? Would any progressive, if they could go back in time, argue against its enactment because of our current situation? Bueller? Bueller? 

THE ROLE OF INSURANCE COMPANIES ARGUMENT

Anyone who’s concerned about the role of insurance companies in our healthcare system would be perverse to oppose AB 8. Here’s why: AB 8 substantially reforms the role of insurers in our healthcare. It sets a floor for the percentage of premium dollars that must be spent on healthcare (85%). It creates a public insurer to change the playing field and guarantee that there’s real competition with low overhead and driving the market in the right direction. Finally, it bans denial of insurance for pre-existing conditions and actually requires health insurance plans to help fund a real, adequately-funded, high-risk pool.

Many of the things we hate about insurance companies are now completely and utterly legal.  It boggles my mind that anyone who supports single-payer healthcare wouldn’t, while we still have the current system, want insurance companies to be better regulated.

(Absolutely. Pushing a rushed reform compromise in two weeks would be a travesty, and it speaks to how deeply broken the legislative process is, because it creates all of these bottlenecks that, deliberately IMO, stifle debate. Sen. Kuehl makes a ton of sense here. However, I would be open to a special session to get something done if the process were made more open. – promoted by David Dayen)

Health Reform and the Year of Magical Thinking

The Year of Magical Thinking is the title of a memoir by Joan Didion detailing her state of denial, inexplicable behaviors and, finally, coming to grips with, the death of her husband. It’s also an apt description of the Governor’s 2007 approach to reforming our broken healthcare system, with the glaring difference that he still hasn’t come to grips with the truth. (After all, if a complicated movie plot could be resolved in less than two hours, who not fix healthcare in California in nine months?)

Beginning in January, the Governor ordered his health advisors to sketch the outlines of a plan that would magically “cover” all Californians by simply requiring them to buy health insurance.  To this moment, he has refused to negotiate any of his major points with the Legislature.  The language for his plan was finally drafted five months later, and shown, under wraps, to a few, select people.  Not one legislator agreed with it, and no one would carry the bill as legislation. 

More on the flip…

To fill the void raised by the Governor’s magical “we must do something this year” drumbeat, the Democratic leaders began crafting their own reform plan.  To date, however, the Governor and the Legislative leadership have remained oceans apart on the broad policy strokes of health care while public support for the current insurance-company controlled system has plummeted and support for the reforms contained in SB 840, the Medicare-like fix for California, has grown.

Now, with less than two weeks remaining in the first half of the two-year legislative session, there is still no “something” on the table and the Governor, like a Barnum and Bailey’s ring leader, continues to announce that he will, assuredly, pull a rabbit out of a black hat.  Actually, there is no way of knowing if the result would really be a rabbit; it could just as easily be an albatross. 

The Governor has further limited discussion by announcing that he would veto both of the legislative proposals that have actually been introduced as real bills. SB 840, by far the most carefully crafted, transparent and fully vetted bill, will remain in the Legislature until next year, since sending it down to him for a veto would end any consideration of single payer until 2009.  The individual mandate provisions in the Governor’s pronouncement are being emphatically rejected by virtually all stakeholders representing the people who would be forced to pay uncapped premiums.  The percentages to be paid by employers and individuals, hospitals and doctors, people in a “pool” and those outside, those above differing percentages of the poverty scale and those below, are so far apart in the Governor’s pronouncements and the Speaker’s bill, you could drive trucks through the gaps.  The Governor’s lynchpin financial mechanism of a provider tax remains submerged under the very murky water of a 2/3 vote.  What convoluted compromise might be devised in a last-minute attempt is anyone’s guess.

Nonetheless, we are told that, unless we agree to pass a yet-to-be hastily drafted bill that incidentally may be the biggest reform proposal ever attempted in health care, and pass it in two weeks, thus completely bypassing the entire political process and any semblance of open public input, we’ve completely failed and health reform is doomed forever.  Please.

The prospect of legislative staff, sitting behind closed doors, hastily crafting a 100-page health reform “compromise”, to be pushed through the legislature with little or no public input over the course of the next 14 days, is deeply irresponsible.  Frankly, given the example of the energy deregulation bill, we ought to know better.

Moreover, we lose nothing by taking advantage of the fact that the sessions of the California legislature are two year sessions.  Many of our major accomplishments, most recently, AB 32, the bill related to greenhouse gas, took more than one year to achieve.  Next year’s Presidential campaigns will ensure that health reform stays as the top of the agenda.  More importantly, the issue of health reform will continue to dominate because the people need it and want it.  What they want, and deserve, however, is responsible health reform, not a new debacle that benefits the health insurance companies the way the electricity bill benefited Enron.

Finally, we must not forget the reason that we are in this crisis to begin with.  Health care premiums changed by insurance companies continue to grow 3-4 times faster than wages.  A solution is needed that pays attention to adequate funding, affordability, cost controls and quality.

Even if the Legislature should pass a last minute convoluted experiment in health reform, there will still be a need to continue the work to enact a fully vetted, Medicare-like single payer system that replaces the insurance companies with a plan for all Californians, allows each person to choose their own providers, and protects affordability, comprehensive coverage and quality.  Such a solution is the only sensible and tested way to achieve universal health care responsibly.  Whatever happens in the next two weeks, the movement for single payer universal health care is continuing to grow, and SB 840 will continue as its focal point, the only legislation that establishes the kind of truly universal, modern and affordable health care system the people of California need and deserve.

by Randy Bayne
X-posted at The Bayne of Blog

At least two health care options, AB 8 (Nuñez) and SB 840 (Kuehl) will be part of the discussion when the governor’s Pension Commission meets in San Jose on Thursday.

The commission has been holding monthly meetings around the state and taking in testimony from stakeholders in the pension debate. They are due to present recommendation to the Governor by January 1, 2008.

Besides discussions on the process by which its report will be developed, the Commission will also have health care on the San Jose agenda.

Sumi Sousa, health-care policy adviser for Speaker Fabian Nuñez, D-Los Angeles, is also expected to give testimony Thursday. Núñez’s AB 8 is the primary legislative vehicle for health-care reform this year. The measure is co-sponsored by Sen. Don Perata, D-Oakland.

I would argue that AB 8 is only considered “primary” because Speaker Nuñez says so, and it is the only bill that has been allowed to see sunlight.

Also on the agenda is the only real solution to the health care crisis, SB 840, Senator Sheila Kuehl’s single payer plan. Sara Rogers, chief of staff to Sen. Sheila Kuehl, will be making the presentation.

Commission spokeswoman Ashley Snee said the commission will be looking at how the various proposals in the Capitol may specifically impact post-retirement health-care benefits. Snee said health care is “inextricably linked” to the discussion of governmental obligations to former employees.

I can tell you how single payer will impact post-retirement benefits. A universal single payer health care system would take health care for retirees out of the retirement system and wipe out the underfunded/unfunded liabilities that currently exist. The solution to the retiree health care issue is before us. All that is needed is the will to take on the insurance industry and do what every other industrialized nation in the world has done successfully — stop tinkering with half solutions like AB 8 and pass a universal, single payer health care system like the one proposed in SB 840.

Single payer would eliminate the need for post-retirement benefits to be provided through retirement systems. Single payer eliminates the underfunded/unfunded liabilities that post-retirement benefits have caused.

( – promoted by Robert in Monterey)

California Speaks:  We Want Single Payer
by Senator Sheila Kuehl

On August 11th, 2007, at the culminating and boisterous OneCareNow rally in Los Angeles, as well as eight coordinated “listening” events around the state, sponsored by Blue Shield and the California Endowment, among others, a random selection of thousands of Californians spoke out overwhelmingly in favor of major health care reform.

At the largest rally of the year, more than two thousand advocates, patients, nurses, doctors and universal health care fans gathered on the steps and lawns of the Los Angeles City Hall to excoriate a health care system that does nothing but devastate working families with systematic cancellations, denials and delays in care.  This doesn’t promote health, it isn’t care, and it certainly isn’t a “system”– it’s traumatizing and often deadly for people who thought they would be given care, but, instead, got nothing but a tangle of insurance red tape. 

Convinced that single-payer universal health care is the only hope for fixing our broken health care system, they gathered to support SB 840 (Kuehl), the only truly universal health care plan proposed in legislation that is shown to contain costs, improve health care quality and allow Californians total choice of their doctors and hospitals.

Perhaps by design, on that same Saturday, health care foundations (including Blue Shield Foundation, Kaiser Family Foundation and the California Endowment) spent over $4 million on an event originally spun as an exercise in “deliberative democracy”, but in reality was carefully structured to control discussion, in order to ask randomly selected participants to discuss and “vote” on their preferences for healthcare reform.

Naming the event CaliforniaSpeaks, organizers claimed the event would bring together thousands of Californians to discuss their perspectives on the current health reform proposals still under debate in Sacramento, yet the agenda was careful to exclude single payer from the discussion.  Organizers of the event told us the reason that they didn’t include single payer was because the governor said he wouldn’t sign it.

Apparently when they said the event was designed to give Californians the chance to set the health care agenda, what they actually meant was that the event would be an opportunity for the people to jump in line with the Governor’s healthcare agenda.  As is often the case, the people had a different idea-they did, in fact, jump; they jumped out of their seats demanding that single payer and SB 840 be included in the discussion, forcing the organizers to tack the issue on at the last minute at the end of the day.

The fact that participants were forced, on their own accord, to demand the inclusion of single payer at the CaliforniaSpeaks events clearly indicates that the conventional political message, mostly propagated by the health insurance companies, has yet to understand that two decades worth of traumatized patients and families, along with an even higher consciousness of our failings set out in Michael Moore’s new film, “SiCKO”, has changed health reform politics forever. 

Consider the overwhelming standing ovation that Steve Skvara received (http://www.youtube.c…) at last Tuesday’s Democratic Presidential Debate when he asked, chocking back tears, “What’s wrong with America?”, describing how his family lost their guaranteed retiree health coverage when the company who owed it to him filed for bankruptcy.  Skvara’s story immediately resonated with millions of Americans across the nation, and he became an instant online celebrity.  Why?  Because he clearly illustrated our broken health care system and the abuses of corporate greed.  Skavara’s story is one of thousands that are positioned to spark the simmering anger that a broad spectrum of Americans feel toward our insurance based non-system. 

California families are becoming so hurt and so incensed at insurance company greed and abuse that they are increasingly willing, like nurse Cynthia Campbell’s husband, to pick up a megaphone and plead “Don’t Kill My Wife” in front of Blue Shield’s headquarters.  And the transformation crosses the political spectrum.  Art DeWerk, the Police Chief for the central valley town of Ceres, spoke out recently in favor of single payer as he described the helplessness he felt after his wife was unable to get timely access to routine medical care as she battled cancer.

These and other stories are found all too often in a health care system where the only competition is between insurance companies focused only on how much risk they can avoid, instead of the more appropriate competition between direct health care providers for quality service, driven by a single payer system that allows total patient choice of doctors and hospitals. And stories like those set out above, as well as others, even worse, will continue until we ditch the “system” that spends 30% of every health care dollar simply to weed out those of us who are sick enough to need our coverage and move to a real universal healthcare system that eliminates the middleman and returns decision making in healthcare to doctors and patients.

By the end of Saturday’s “listening” event, after everyone had discussed the intricacies of the incremental plans, single payer surprised the organizers by polling better than the others, with significantly more people saying they would support it under any condition.  For those who supported a generic single payer system, but with conditions, SB 840 was, in fact, the only plan that actually met all the conditions set out by the discussants.  For example, 53% of the participants statewide said they would support single payer if they could choose their own doctors and hospitals.  SB 840 guarantees this.  In contrast, both mandates which define the Governor’s policy paper and the Speaker of the Assembly’s bill, AB 8, received support by the discussants only if there were caps on costs and premiums.  In fact, neither proposal currently includes this provision.

Both the rally in Los Angeles and CaliforniaSpeaks showed us that the people of California are way ahead of the Governor, as well as the Speaker, with regard to healthcare.  At the end of the day, more participants felt that quality of care shouldn’t depend on how much money you have, that everyone should have access, and that greed should be kept out of the health care system.

Interestingly, and perhaps tellingly, later that same day, the Governor was quoted on a Fresno news station as saying he would sign SB 840 “as soon as we have the money for it”.  Of course, the Lewin Report, studying the factors set out in the bill, has already shown how the plan will be funded.  But, whether the Governor’s pronouncement signals a serious shift in his thinking, it certainly acknowledges the political momentum that SB 840 has garnered.  I welcome the conversation on funding, because we’ve got the money.  SB 840 can easily be achieved with our current health care spending, personal, employer and state and federal.  It would use the money wasted by the insurance companies on denying care to provide it, to all Californians, without co-pays or deductibles, for one affordable premium each year.  What we need is the political will to catch up with the will of the people of California.