Arnold Schwarzenegger and Fabian Nuñez have made agreements behind closed doors on a new $14 billion dollar health care plan, and despite the fact that we're on the brink of a fiscal emergency, even though Don Perata has favored a go-slow approach, asking to deal with the burgeoning budget deficit before a new health package, it appears that we're going to have a vote in the Assembly on Monday. And that has displeased some key stakeholders.
Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez's effort to speed a healthcare overhaul plan through the Legislature is being opposed by the trade group that represents California's labor unions, which is taking the rare step of urging Democratic legislators to defy their own leader.
In a letter obtained Saturday, the California Labor Federation's leader, Art Pulaski, urged Assembly members to postpone the Monday vote on the bill, which Nuñez (D-Los Angeles) submitted Friday after reaching agreements with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on the scope of a plan to require almost all Californians to hold healthcare insurance.
Writing that "we are dismayed at the process," Pulaski complained that neither labor nor lawmakers had had enough time to vet the complex measure and decide whether it offered adequate protections against middle-class workers' being forced to purchase insurance policies they could not afford.
"We feel cheated of the opportunity to take a position on a bill that will impact the lives of every working family in California," Pulaski wrote. "We do not know whether this bill will protect working families who cannot afford a healthcare mandate or whether families will be driven into low-quality, high-deductible plans."
So we have a bill submitted on a Friday which lawmakers are expected to vote coming Monday. It's 239 pages long and completely unclear, not just on affordability for the insurance itself, but on the floor for basic coverage and the ceiling for deductible costs. Health care experts have not fully made that determination. Add onto that the struggles of states to manage large-scale universal plans with their particular constraints, mainly on constitutionally mandated balanced budgets. We are in a $14 billion dollar budget hole and with a Governor itching to balance that on the backs of poor and elderly Californians with a 10% across-the-board budget cut. There simply aren't all that many areas you can cut that aren't protected by voter initiatives other than those in the health and human services sector. Does that factor in to this parallel plan at all? Not to mention the fact that so much of the funding option is predicated on federal funding at a time when the Democrats can't get SCHIP past the President's veto pen, which will result in tens of thousands of California children being denied coverage within a matter of weeks.
Despite all of these questions and concerns, the Assembly is being asked to rush through legislation that they probably haven't read or vetted. I think health care is simply too important to do so. |
