Tom Campbell's Kind-Of-Interesting But Just-A-Mask-For-Friedmanism Health Care Proposal

Tom Campbell, among all the Republicans in the gubernatorial field, has at least been willing to lay out detailed plans for how he would fix the state. Typically this manifests itself as the same old Hooverism. But his health care plan at least gets points for creativity.

GOP gubernatorial hopeful Tom Campbell released a unique health care proposal Thursday that would redistribute $42 billion in federal and state funds already spent on health care in California to buy private health coverage for everyone in the state who's "involuntarily" uninsured.

Under the former congressman's plan, the funds would cover an estimated 2 million such people in addition to the 7.6 million already receiving public health coverage under the state Medi-Cal and Healthy Families programs.

"The astounding conclusion," Campbell writes in his proposal, "is that, using only the money already being spent by the federal and state governments for health care in California, we could buy free market health insurance currently available and cover all involuntarily uninsured in California, and still have more than $700 per person left over!"

Instead of dedicating funds to services for the poor or children, Campbell would split the state into regions, and allow insurers to bid against one another to cover everyone in that region who earned below a certain level, along with everyone denied coverage for a pre-existing condition. Insurers wouldn't bid on price, but quality of coverage - the money would be fixed, and insurers would bid against each other based on what they would cover and at what rate.

I'm wondering why any insurer would bid for this right. They deny people with pre-existing conditions because they are more likely to use health care, increasing their medical loss ratio. And the poor are more likely to need health care treatment based on lifestyle and environment. And the kicker to Campbell's plan is, if nobody bids, the status quo would remain in place for that geographical area. So basically, Campbell is touting a big plan that would do... nothing. And he wouldn't embark on it if the federal government enacts their own plan.

Mavericky!

Really, that interesting, if impossible (try getting a federal waiver to set it up and face Congressmembers with interests in protecting SCHIP and Medicaid), proposal is a cover for Campbell's apparent agenda - to permit the interstate sale of insurance and to bring up the canard of tort reform as a panacea. Medical malpractice is an insignificant percentage of total health care costs and states which have embarked on major medmal reform, like Texas, have seen no change in health inflation. As for the interstate sale of insurance, you can do it now - only you're responsible to comply with the laws of the state in which you sell. This proposal would allow insurers to only be responsible to the regulations of the state where they are based. Tom Campbell wants to do for the health insurance industry what this kind of proposal did for the credit card industry - send all insurance companies to a small state with no regulation, and gut all state-based regulation in the process, leaving California's insurance customers at the mercy of the laws of South Dakota or Mississippi.

To his credit, Campbell wants to remove the anti-trust exemption on the insurance industry. But really, that's a means to an end here. However, there is a point of consensus between conservatives and liberals to do away with the McCarran-Ferguson Act, that offers that anti-trust exemption. Bills to this effect were just introduced in Congress. If Campbell wants to talk them up to the California GOP delegation, go ahead.

Meg Whitman: Maths Iz Hard: UPDATE Arnold Enjoyes Meg Math

UPDATED at the top, as the Governor lays off 5,000 state workers, the perfect thing to get California working again. He's basically borrowing from the Whitman playbook here. See below for why that's crazy.

It's a long way until the 2010 Governor's race, but I think Calitics needs to do our part in pointing out that Meg Whitman is frequently full of crap. She's seized on this idea that California's problems can merely be solved by firing all the state employees. Now, first of all, California has the second-lowest rate of state employees per capita in the entire nation, a conveniently forgotten fact by eMeg and the rest of the swinging corporate raiders in the Yacht Party. Next, as Josh Richman explains:

“We haven’t looked hard enough at where we can cut. We can lay off 20,000 to 30,000 state employees while prioritizing public safety and teachers,” Whitman told the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. “We shouldn’t have to lay off teachers, we need to lay off bureaucrats.”

Fact is, “cut the bloated bureaucracy” has been a GOP rallying cry for decades, and yet whenever the study, the audit or the blue-ribbon commission report comes back, we’re suddently talking about far less “waste, fraud and abuse” than they’d implied. Is there some fat to cut? Sure. Should we? Probably. Will it fix this deficit? Not even close.

The budget deficit now looks to be about $21.3 billion; it would be about $15 billion if voters approved Propositions 1C, 1D and 1E next week, but that almost certainly ain’t gonna happen. And $21 billion isn’t 30,000 jobs, as George Skelton so eloquently put it back in February:

According to the state budget document, there is the equivalent of 205,000 full-time jobs controlled by the governor. There actually are more workers than that because some are part-time. Do the math based on 16 months, since that’s now the time frame of the projected deficit, assuming a balanced-budget package could be implemented by March 1.

You could lay off all those state workers — rid yourself of their pay and benefits — and save only $24.4 billion.

Meanwhile, you would have dumped 160,000 convicted felons onto the streets because all the prisons were closed after the guards and wardens were fired. There’d be no Highway Patrol because all the officers were canned. State parks would be closed because there were no fee-collectors or rangers.

Truth is the savings wouldn’t even add up to $24.4 billion because some of those employees are paid out of small special funds that are self-sustaining.

If these people were in an empty trash bin, they'd still clamor to "cut the waste."

Let me again commend Chris Kelly's Meg Whitman week on the Huffington Post, he's doing an oppo research job that should practically ensure him a spot on any number of campaign staffs. I particularly like the part detailing the $1.78 million she stole from Goldman Sachs, which for all I know might make her a folk hero.

Next year oughta be fun.

...by the way, I'm not letting other Yacht Party gubernatorial hopefuls off the hook either, like Tom Campbell. He predictably dissembles about California's low per-pupil spending on K-12 education, making the same debunked "hey, the schools have plenty of money" claim that Dan Walters likes to peddle. Allow me to introduce them both to Julia Rosen circa April 2008, which by the way is before the even deeper cuts to schools made in the February budget agreement.