California Legislature, Governor In Intense Discussions Over Health Care Reform Bill

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.laborradio.org/node/6718

California Legislature, Governor In Intense Discussions Over Health Care Reform Bill - 08/31/07

By Doug Cunningham

With just two weeks left in California’s legislative session, leaders in both houses are working on a heath care reform bill that would require employers to provide health insurance. The California Labor Federation’s Art Pulaski.

: “Employers would pay seven and a half percent of payroll, up to the maximum of social security taxable income, which is what – about $96,000. And the nemployers would ither have to provide coverage for their employees or put that money – an equivalent amount of money – into a pot, whereby the state would have a large risk pool available for people who are not provided insurance directly by their employers.”

Pulaski says a single-payer universal health care bill did not advance in the legislature, but there’s a real chance that this one will.

: “The discussions are becoming intense between the leadership and the governor in terms of how we negotiate this bill out. And so I expect that we’re gonna see more significant progress over the next week.”

[fed-up]

1. SB 840 passed house/senate last year, arnold vetoed it. June this year passed Senate-now in Assembly

http://onecarenow.org/index.html

Senate Bill 840 is the solution to our healthcare crisis
The OneCareNow Campaign supports Senate Bill 840(Kuehl) as the one healthcare reform proposal in California that will provide high quality healthcare for all and while controlling costs.

On August 11, the Great LA Healthcare Rally showed massive support for SB 840 as the healthcare solution for California. Now that the CA budget has passed, the Governor wants to reconcile his ill conceived health insurance plan with a bill from the Assembly(AB 8) to expand coverage to the uninsured through the current wasteful, bloated private insurance bureaucracy. The healthcare reform bar must be raised to SB 840 to provide comprehensive, universal healthcare at affordable prices now. On June 6, SB 840 passed the California Senate and now in the Assembly.

On this website, you’ll learn how one bold change will bring full care for all, for life, for less. Healthcare should not be a nightmare. It should be real care – just as it is in every other developed nation.

Controlling healthcare costs?
Our argument is simple: all plans that expand the business of the private insurance industry are doomed to fail because they won’t control costs. How can they when their profits, marketing costs and duplicated, look-alike plans currently waste 30% of every healthcare dollar they handle in California? The private insurance market has failed to control costs; we have the most free market in insurance in the industrialized world and we pay TWICE as much for our healthcare. Click here to compare our healthcare costs with other capitalist countries. Governor Schwarzenegger thinks forcing people to buy more private insurance is the answer. But if private insurers have failed to control costs for the past 50 years, why should we expect these failures to succeed now? Click here to compare Schwarzenegger's plan to Kuehl's SB 840

"Administrative cost limits?"
Governor Schwarzenegger wants to cap the "administrative costs" of the insurance companies at 15%. This is a whopping 12% more than Medicare’s 3% administrative cost which is roughly the same as the estimated administrative cost under SB 840 and in the healthcare systems in virtually every other developed nation!

We don’t believe it’s in our best interest to sustain an insurance system that cannot control costs or an insurance business whose primary financial incentive is to deny healthcare to people.

Universal healthcare?
The other proposed plans cannot control costs and, more to the point, cannot provide so-called "universal" coverage – care for everyone. Specifically, Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposal claims universal coverage through an “individual mandate” (a favorite insurance "reform" proposal for the past 30 years) that has absolutely no chance of actually covering everyone.

Individual mandates?
An “individual mandate,” a law that requires everyone to purchase insurance one way or another, has proved to be an utter failure in the state of California because it is essentially unenforceable.

For instance, there is an “individual mandate” to purchase auto insurance in the state, yet 25% of California drivers are uninsured, according to the insurance industry's Insurance Journal. Why should we expect everyone to buy health insurance, which is even more expensive than auto insurance, when 25% of the drivers in the state ignore the existing “individual mandate” for auto insurance?

Insurance market reforms?
The proposed plans, while claiming to control costs through “insurance market reforms” will actually add new layers of bureaucracy onto the current overly bureaucratic system because all of them feature multiple insurance risk pools.

A 2005 nonpartisan Lewin Group report estimates that we would save $20 billion a year in California by cutting the wasteful private insurance industry out of the equation and establishing a single payer system. America is #1 in cost for healthcare, spending twice the amount per capita as any other nation, but ranking 37th in results according to the Institute of Medicine.

Why “single-payer” is the answer.
Only a universal single payer system provides true universal health coverage and controls costs by consolidating the enormous bureaucratic waste. A universal single payer system saves employers money.

Explore these pages of our OneCareNow campaign website or visit www.healthcareforall.org to learn more about the single payer concept and why it will work – as it already does in virtually every other developed nation.

Thank you for your interest. The OneCareNow campaign inspires and attracts more people every day! Join our passion.

We know how to fix healthcare. What are we waiting for?