• According to Dan Walters, all his serious economist friends are telling him there's no recession yet, theoreticaly speaking. He might want to read his own paper, about how the Employment Development Department can't keep up with the demand for unemployment benefits and everyone calling in is getting a busy signal. Tip to those who apparently aren't feeling a recession: use the EDD website.
• In a reversal to the Bush Administration, a judge has ruled that George Bush cannot exempt the Navy from environmental laws regarding the use of sonar within 12 miles of the California coast. Not that Bush followed the ruling of the judiciary the first time, but...
• There are still high hopes for an end to the WGA strike, and meetings in Los Angeles and New York have been scheduled for the weekend (ostensibly to present the contract), but caution lies ahead, as more foreign imports and reality television are likely to wind up on schedules, and less pilots are likely to be shot. Of course, this was my point all along, and why I underscored the need to grow the union for the benefit of everyone involved and give everything on television the opportunity to unionize. But jurisdiction for reality and animation was dropped in the most recent round of talks, and there will be consequences to that.
• Our friends at the SEIU are going to start a $75 million dollar, year-long, national campaign in support of universal health care. I have to think that this is a positive by-product of the coalition built in California around the ultimately unsuccessful effort on health care reform. If so, then there was nothing unsuccessful about it. It's very exciting to see a full media and ground effort to draw the policy distinctions on health care between the parties, and to advocate for a system that makes sense for working families.
Use this as a repository for everything but the election.
It looks like the dream of major health care reform is over in California, at least for this year. The LA Times reports:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's yearlong effort to arrange medical insurance for nearly all Californians will be rejected by a state Senate panel this afternoon, according to people familiar with the decision.
The move would effectively kill one of the governor's most ambitious policy goals.
Senate President Don Perata (D-Oakland) made the decision after canvassing Democratic senators over the weekend and finding almost no support for the measure, which the Assembly passed last month.
There was some thought that Perata would use some parliamentary maneuvers to ensure the bill's passage, but apparently he couldn't find anyone to create a majority for the measure.
Anthony York openly wonders whether or not this spells the end of the current leadership structure in the state Legislature.
But watching the California Legislature in action last week felt like watching the end of an era -- and bearing witness to the creation of a power vacuum. In a political ballet that played out over several days, the prospects for two seemingly unrelated but intimately connected political issues -- a healthcare reform bill and a change in the state's term-limits law -- withered simultaneously. And as their fortunes sank, so did the power of the current legislative leadership [...]
Then more bad news for the healthcare bill. Mid-afternoon Wednesday, Gloria Negrete McLeod (D-Chino) announced that she too was voting against the legislation, citing concerns about the affordability of the mandated insurance.After her vote, a senator who sits on the committee characterized the situation as a "total implosion." He told me that the rumored poll numbers on Proposition 93 were making it harder to get the healthcare bill out of committee. If the prospects for the initiative's passage were as bad as the numbers suggested, he said, the stigma of a lame duck, and a corresponding loss of influence, might attach to Perata and Nuñez.
Let me say that health care reform may end in California for now, but it does not end nationally, and indeed one has little effect on the other. This is still something in which Americans are broadly in favor. And it's still a framework that every Democratic candidate has laid out. With a new Democratic President, health care reform will be at the top of the agenda, and at the federal level it has a far greater chance of being fiscally sustainable. There are still significant measures that could be taken in California that would improve conditions, in particular mandating guaranteed issue and expanding public programs. But the perils and pitfalls of balancing an enormous overhaul on an unsteady budgetary picture proved too great.
I'm not shocked, or even particularly saddened, by this. It never really looked to me like the finances worked out, and though the political coalition around the bill was heartening and impressive, the rabid dead-enders of the Californian GOP (they're actually worse than national Republicans) wouldn't allow even a cent of new money, and without a truly stable funding source, you really can't do this at the state level. Indeed, money is why all these state plans fail. For fiscal reasons, this has to be a federal initiative. Because states are more politically flexible than the federal government, they can often seem a more viable arena for health reform. But the policies always collapse.
Sheila Kuehl, Chair of the California Senate Health Committee that is holding a hearing on AB X1 1, the Nunez-Schwarzenegger health coverage bill, has just announced that a vote on the bill by the committee will not take place until Monday. She announced that the delay in the vote on the bill was requested by Senate President pro Tem Don Perata, who is a coauthor of the bill [...]
The building is rife with rumors as to Senators being asked to step down from the committee or asking to be taken off of it, and other procedural moves to get the bill out of the committee. With vote postponed, that gives additional time to possibly amend the bill, change the committee membership, and for those on one side or the other of the issue to bombard their Senators with calls, emails, and visits. The outcome is unknown as well as whether Perata will take extraordinary measures to move the bill.
With the LAO report today giving little cover to those pushing the reform (if the average premium is $300 per person, as the LAO expects, the program is underfunded in the first year), and both Kuehl, Yee, and possibly Gloria McLeod wavering, obviously some serious efforts are being made to turn this ship around. The SF Chronicle had a very good article about this today.
Stay tuned. It should be a wild weekend in the Capitol.
Should government mandate the purchase of for-profit insurance products, backed up by threats to garnish wages or place a lien on homes? Or should we move to a guaranteed healthcare system modeled on the single-payer financing that is working in Taiwan, Canada, and most of Europe?
This very interesting debate is happening simultaneously at the national and state levels-because mandated insurance is the top priority of the insurance industry, and they're pushing it everywhere they can.
Conversations with press like this happen every day, every hour in the Capitol; it's why the building exists.
But I guess most conversations aren't on the subject of the insurance industry's number one priority-which is to pass an "individual mandate" law. And most conversations don't happen as a gigantic fake healthcare reform bill seems to be careening to an ugly defeat.
Which is why most conversations don't end with patients being cited for a misdemeanor.
The California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee put out a simple call for a petition last week, demanding access for our patients to CheneyCare, the guaranteed, non-profit, quality healthcare available to Dick Cheney. (Sign up if you haven't already.)
Thanks for tuning in once again, hopeful Americans
And welcome to what John Edwards has called "the Fight for America's Middle Class". This is a fight to reclaim a Voice in our Democratic process -- to speak up for those people, who need a Champion, like you and me.
1st a Question: Who is the Middle Class?
America is sometimes called a "middle-class country," but nobody - not economists, sociologists, or the U.S. Census Bureau - seems to have a clear definition of who the middle class actually is. The notion of where a dividing line between "middle class" and "working class" might be is an elusive one ...
a non-partisan and non-profit organization, reports that the middle class has conventionally come to mean families with incomes between $25,000 and $100,000 each year.
...
As NOW reported in "Middle Class Squeeze" (Dec 13, 2002), the shape of income distribution in America is changing and many are finding it increasingly difficult to afford housing while keeping up with necessities such as food, clothing, transportation, and health care.
Pre-existing condition? No problem. Guaranteed healthcare? Of course. Heartless insurance bureaucrats meddling in medical decisions? No way. A single standard of quality care? Nothing less will do.
(Tragically, the girl in question, Nataline Sarkisyan, died yesterday evening after this diary was posted. nyceve at Daily Kos has more about the netroots' role in forcing CIGNA to capitulate. - promoted by Robert in Monterey)
I am pasting a release below about the Dec. 20 "Patient's Revolt" that forced heartless CIGNA corporation to approve the liver transplant that could save the life of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkysian.
It's been an emotional day involving hundreds of people, but there are a couple of lessons I want to take away.
First--we have power. We shouldn't be afraid to use it. A unique coalition of the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee, a union, together with netroots and the Armenian Community shamed a global insurance corporation into doing the right thing.
Second--we shouldn't have to do this...and every candidate pushing to mandate individuals purchase insurance products from the likes of CIGNA, who would still be in the business of profiting through the denial of care, should think long and hard. Are the CIGNA's of the world really the people who should control our healthcare dollars?
I thought this was the key moment in the Appropriations Committee debate over ABx1 1, which passed the Assembly yesterday.
Republican Assemblywoman Mimi Walters asked Nunez and the Department of Finance whether they were certain financial projections would come through. AB x1 1 relies on $4.5 billion in federal dollars in addition to other revenue sources. Department of Finance staffer Tom Sheehy said one provision in ABx1 1 would not be implemented unless the Director of Finance declared that money to pay for the program was in hand and in state coffers.
Assemblyman Mark Leno, Democrat chairman of the Appropriations committee, followed up with questions about whether the program could be turned off if money did not come in as expected. Nunez' staff responded that ballot initiative would contain provisions to assure that insufficient funds would trigger a series of events to pull back the program, including the individual mandate and the market reforms. It would first allow the governor and legislature to fix any fiscal imbalances. If lawmakers and the governor did not act, then the pieces of the legislation would be repealed, including the public program expansions and tax credits, returning the state to the status quo.
This is the key because this is what has happened to every single state that has tried to implement anything approaching universal health care. They pass the bills with a lot of fanfare but are either unable to control costs or keep up with population or their numbers on revenue fall short (nobody EXPECTED the $14 billion dollar budget deficit this year, to use a parallel example), and the program has to be scaled back and eventually scrapped. And there's no massive celebration or gathering on that day, where everyone gets in a room and congratulates each other. But that's what's happened very single time.
The bill has some advances on the health reform front, and is not an ignoble effort. But nobody seems to want to deal with these historical facts. "This is better than nothing" doesn't mean anything when 5-7 years down the road, you're ACTUALLY left with nothing. And I think walling off the funding and claiming that it's revenue neutral makes it more likely that road will be travelled again. The state budget should reflect priorities. We all want every Californian to have access to health care. Paying for it with part gimmick taxes, part wishes and hopes of federal support, et cetera, shows that you really don't value it all that much. And admitting that the program will fall apart unless people continue smoking a lot of cigarettes... well, you see where I'm headed.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein, the sharpest commentator on health care in the progressive blogosphere, on the plan:
It is, in short, a pretty good plan -- better, in certain ways, than those offered by the national Democrats -- and it's got the support of folks ranging from the Democratic legislature to Arnold Schwarzenegger to Andy Stern. I'm not super confident in its long-term prospects, as various groups are going to spend hundreds of millions to defeat the ballot initiative containing its financing package, and even if the plan survives that, I still don't believe states have the fiscal strength to sustain universal health care in times of recession. But I'd like to see it pass, if only for the momentum it would give the national conversation over health reform.
Klein doesn't get back to his native California much, so I can forgive him for later plaudits in the post about Schwarzenegger. But I definitely associate with the remarks I've bolded.
"I think it's DOA. I haven't found anybody yet that I have talked to that can make any sense out of it. It sounds ridiculous to say that we're going to have health care for everybody in four years, but in the meantime most people won't have health care because we have to cut the budget," Perata told KPIX.
On Monday, the Senate leader sent a letter to the nonpartisan legislative analyst asking what the fiscal impact of the health plan would be on California's budget deficit.
"You couldn't balance your home checkbook that way, much less run the fifth or sixth largest economy in the world," Perata continued in the interview.
Then he ended with this: "He simply does not understand the way in which this works," though it's not clear from the clip who the Oakland Democrat is referring to.
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.
While politicians debate individual mandates-a/k/a forcing Americans to purchase expensive, unworkable insurance products from the very corporations who brought you our healthcare disaster-more evidence rolls in about how Americans are being bankrupted by their health insurance.
From Iowa to California to Massachusetts, the national healthcare debates are finally starting to hit the key point: the problem of the health insurance corporations. We'll take a look below…cross-posted at the National Nurses Organizing Committee/California Nurses Association's Breakroom Blog, as we organize for GUARANTEED healthcare on the single-payer model.
The Wall St. Journal reports on the new marketing plans for the health insurance companies: push health care reform, reap $100 billion in annual public subsidies!
We'll take a look at that, as well as the GOP candidates who don't care about cancer, the Sacramento insiders letting kids' health fail run out, and new problems with the "Massachusetts mandate" law.
Zenei Cortez, RN, has been a working bedside nurse for 30 years and is a member of the Council of Presidents of National Nurses Organizing Committee and California Nurses Association…and we're quite proud to say she's the first Filipino to hold that office.
While reading her words, remember the experience that Registered Nurses across this country share: every day they watch patients *with* health insurance go broke, and get sick because they can't afford the medical treatment they are allegedly covered for. This is a key reason RNs oppose health care "reform" built on padding forcing more patients into the arms of the insurers who messed things up in the first place.
I hate to be melodramatic, but that's pretty much what it comes down to.
At least according to today's report finding that America is last among industrialized democracies in terms of infant mortality. Because our healthcare system is set up to guarantee billions of dollars of profit to unnecessary insurance corporations, kids born here are more likely to die than they are in countries with guaranteed healthcare through the single-payer model.
(Apologies to the Thers at Whiskey Fire for stealing his gimmick of using a Guided By Voices lyric as a blog title)
I feel like there are two completely different conversations happening on the major issues of the day in California. In one, there is an historic opportunity to provide quality health care to everyone in the state, which will be affordable and comprehensive and go a long way toward solving our numerous health care problems. In the other, the state is completely in the fucking toilet and nobody in a position of power has the political will to do anything about it.
Now the governor finds himself in a predicament similar to that of his predecessor, Democrat Gray Davis: staring at a crippling budget shortfall that threatens to overshadow all other business in the Capitol and tarnish his political legacy.
On Monday, Schwarzenegger ordered all state agencies to prepare plans to cut spending across the board by 10% next year. Education, transportation and healthcare will all be affected. Some programs face elimination. Layoffs may loom. The state's budget shortfall, thanks largely to the troubled housing market, has ballooned from a few billion dollars projected at the beginning of the year to $10 billion.
Experts are not surprised.
"There has been lots of talk and lots of gimmicks, but none of the state's underlying budget problems have been dealt with," said Ryan Ratcliff, an economist at the UCLA Anderson Forecast. "Even in the middle of a revenue boom, we kept spending more than we take in."
Spending has increased, but the issue is structural. There's no way California can meet the needs of its burgeoning population under the draconian revenue and spending structure we have in place, and the Governor has made no moves to fundamentally change that, just to pass the horror show on to whoever replaces him in the most hacktastic manner possible. Here's Kevin Drum.
