{"id":13549,"date":"2011-06-06T18:15:01","date_gmt":"2011-06-06T18:15:01","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-06-07T19:12:23","modified_gmt":"2011-06-07T19:12:23","slug":"ab52-the-insurance-lobby-and-the-democrats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/2011\/06\/06\/ab52-the-insurance-lobby-and-the-democrats\/","title":{"rendered":"AB-52, The Insurance Lobby, and the Democrats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Seneca Doane has a great post on Daily Kos from a few days ago about AB52<\/a><\/p>\n

On Wednesday I wrote, in a diary entitled “CA Health Insurers will win tomorrow” (and then continued in its text “or not — if we can stop them”), about AB-52, the bill that would allow the Insurance Commissioner — currently Dave Jones, the driving force behind the bill — to regulate health insurance premium increases in the same way that he now does automobile and properly\/casualty insurance.<\/p>\n

I have some good news and some bad news.<\/p>\n

The good news is that the bill passed the Assembly yesterday.<\/p>\n

More good news is that only one Democrat voted “no.”<\/p>\n

The bad news is that no Republicans voted “no” on the floor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll advise you to go back to the dKos diary for the intricacies of the vote, but one important note here is that once again the Calderons are being an obstacle to progress.<\/p>\n

The bill would allow the Insurance Commissioner to have some real authority over health care premiums for the first time by requiring a reasonableness and actuarial review before an increase could go forward.  This seems like a kind of “duh” idea, but it has taken quite a while to move forward.  Dave Jones, the current commissioner tried getting this bill passed while in the  assembly several times without any real success.  It shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that the insurance lobby has a bit of clout in Sacramento.<\/p>\n

And surprise surprise, Charles Calderon and another one of the usual suspects, Asm. Jose Solorio, abstained from the vote along with many Republicans. After attempting to force Asm. Feuer to water down the bill in committee, apparently he just couldn’t bring himself to support even this simplest of regulation on an industry that is clearly out of control.<\/p>\n

The bill did pass the assembly, and is headed for the Senate. Lois Wolk, who voted against the bill when Jones brought it forward, is on the committee that will review the bill.  You may want to contact her<\/a> or the other Senators on the Committee<\/a>, especially if you are in their districts. Full list over the flip.<\/p>\n

Members:<\/h2>\n

<\/p>\n

\n
\tSenator Ed Hernandez (Chair)<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Tony Strickland (Vice Chair)<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Elaine Alquist<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Joel Anderson<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Sam Blakeslee<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Kevin de Le\u00f3n<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Mark DeSaulnier<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Michael Rubio<\/a><\/p>\n

\tSenator Lois Wolk<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seneca Doane has a great post on Daily Kos from a few days ago about AB52<\/a><\/p>\n

On Wednesday I wrote, in a diary entitled “CA Health Insurers will win tomorrow” (and then continued in its text “or not — if we can stop them”), about AB-52, the bill that would allow the Insurance Commissioner — currently Dave Jones, the driving force behind the bill — to regulate health insurance premium increases in the same way that he now does automobile and properly\/casualty insurance.<\/p>\n

I have some good news and some bad news.<\/p>\n

The good news is that the bill passed the Assembly yesterday.<\/p>\n

More good news is that only one Democrat voted “no.”<\/p>\n

The bad news is that no Republicans voted “no” on the floor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll advise you to go back to the dKos diary for the intricacies of the vote, but one important note here is that once again the Calderons are being an obstacle to progress.<\/p>\n

The bill would allow the Insurance Commissioner to have some real authority over health care premiums for the first time by requiring a reasonableness and actuarial review before an increase could go forward.  This seems like a kind of “duh” idea, but it has taken quite a while to move forward.  Dave Jones, the current commissioner tried getting this bill passed while in the  assembly several times without any real success.  It shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise that the insurance lobby has a bit of clout in Sacramento.<\/p>\n

And surprise surprise, Charles Calderon and another one of the usual suspects, Asm. Jose Solorio, abstained from the vote along with many Republicans. After attempting to force Asm. Feuer to water down the bill in committee, apparently he just couldn’t bring himself to support even this simplest of regulation on an industry that is clearly out of control.<\/p>\n

The bill did pass the assembly, and is headed for the Senate. Lois Wolk, who voted against the bill when Jones brought it forward, is on the committee that will review the bill.  You may want to contact her<\/a> or the other Senators on the Committee<\/a>, especially if you are in their districts. Full list over the flip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Pvhz-3wx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/calitics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}