Lots In The Air On CA Health Care

Seems like a great deal of things are happening on the health care front, but I don't think any of them point to significant reform in this legislative session. In fact, people are trying to scramble for alternatives.

Dan Weintraub has a feature on Fabian Nuñez' attempts to get through to the Governor that the other side of the aisle is simply not interested in compromise. As Julia noted the other day, Nuñez will put the Governor's plan up for a vote tomorrow, and nobody will vote for it.

The speaker says he intends to package the governor's plan as legislation and present it to the Assembly, where it will surely die. In fact, Núñez said, his own vote for the bill, which he will cast as a "courtesy," will likely be the only support the governor's plan receives.

"I'm going to take him from the stratosphere, and I am going to ground him," Núñez told me in an interview in his Capitol office. "He needs a little grounding. Nobody likes his plan."

I don't know how the Governor is going to respond to this, but clearly observers aren't thinking it will end in sweetness and light. They're making other plans.

State Sen. Darrell Steinberg is floating a plan to cover all children as a fallback reform should nothing else materialize.

"We ought to achieve comprehensive health care reform, but our first priority must be children," Sen. Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, said Wednesday at a Capitol news conference to tout children's health care.

Steinberg's Senate Bill 32 and a companion bill, Assembly Bill 1 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, would expand the children's Healthy Families Program by increasing the household income limit from $51,625 for a family of four, or 250 percent of the federal poverty level, to $61,950, or 300 percent.

But there's currently no funding in the legislation, which would require the state to spend $225 million more annually to cover the estimated 800,000 children without insurance in California.

Any legislation would have to be approved before the Legislature adjourns Sept. 14, unless Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger calls a special session.

"If our bills become the vehicle (for health care changes), they will be amended to include a funding source to either fund the full amount or at least a significant start for year one," Steinberg said.

Obviously, there's no chance of this happening without S-CHIP expansion, which the Governor is trying to get the President to authorize. Children's healthcare is cheap and saves the state money in the long run, along with being simply the right thing to do. But it's a small step, not the big change that Californians want. The Governor is opposed to a piecemeal approach, for the record, but could he really veto children's health care?

To that end, a couple unlikely partners are looking to the ballot box for an eventual answer.

In 2004, the California Restaurant Association led the successful effort to repeal SB 2, which would have required employers to provide health insurance to their employees. On the other side of that multimillion-dollar battle was the California Medical Association and organized labor.

Labor and the CMA are both heavily engaged in the ongoing Capitol negotiations, while business groups have rejected both the Democrats' and the governor's proposal as untenable. But the restaurants' proposal may serve as a starting point for negotiations for a possible November 2008 ballot initiative, just in case a deal cannot be hammered out this year.

"We are not ready to give up on current legislative proposals, but are interested in hearing what CRA has to say," said CMA's top lobbyist, Dustin Corcoran. "As a longtime proponent of universal health care, CMA welcomes any serious effort to reform health care and looks forward to further discussions."

But Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Association, said his members are "moving forward as if the Legislature has already concluded its business." Condie said, "It appears the Legislature is incapable of producing needed reform, so we decided to look to the initiative process."

I don't know whether this is serious or just an attempt to put pressure on the Legislature to get something done. The CRA is floating an 1% increase in the sales tax to cover the cost of health care, that's really all the details that have come out.

This might be just chaos before everything actually fits into place and a deal is brokered. I'm not seeing that, however.