The Governor has promised to work to remove health care mandates as a means of reducing health care costs to consumers. A good idea–can he really accomplish it?
The Dems are committed to those mandates, passing them while Gray Davis was governor. During the early part of his time, Gray Davis signed approximately 20 of those mandates, including a mandate that all mental health services be covered and a mandate that insurance companies pay for a two day stay for a mother after the birth of a child (even if the stay was not necessary). These mandates increased the cost of health insurance by around forty percent between 1998 and 2002. At least one study has said that, for each one percent increase in premiums, 400,000 people nationally lose their health insurance. Since California has ten percent of the national employment, that number is approximately 40,000, that is, an estimated 1.6 million people lost their health insurance since 1998 as a result of insurance mandates imposed by the legislature. Since we know that the number of uninsured Californians has increased by about 2 million since 1998, we can safely say that the legislature has had more to do with the current health care crisis in California than any other single factor (illegal immigration is a distant second on the scale, and Walmart doesn’t even blip). Removing the mandates is the right way to reverse this trend.
That being said, the Governor has not demonstrated strong negotiating skills with this Legislature. His idea of bipartisanship is giving in to the Democrats’ demands. According to at least one rumor, in the midst of the negotiations over AB 32 (the greenhouse gas bill), Susan Kennedy called the Dems to demand a change in the bill or "the Governor would veto" the legislation, and then called back twenty minutes later and said "forget it, just get the bill to us and he’ll sign." That is "working" with the Dems in the Legislature.
They know that all they have to do is wait, as they did with the bonds, with the budget, with the greenhouse gas bill, and with just about every other major piece of legislation, and they will get everything they want, including the ability to browbeat the Republicans in the Legislature over the Governor’s support of their wacky ideas. We can only hope that the Governor exercises real negotiating skills in this session, or at least listens to the Republicans when they talk to him about how to deal with the Democrats.
We’ll see
November 21st, 2006 at 12:00 am
It is hard to believe that Susan Kennedy refused to play hardball with the Democrats over the greenhouse gas bill (AB 32).
After all, Republican Chairman Duf Sundheim declared that the “The Susan Kennedy issue is over.” I thught she was on our side. What a shock!
On a more serious note —
Given what we know about the Governor and his Democrat advisors, it seems very unlikely that he will sponsor legislation to remove any healthcare mandates at all. It seems much more likely that he will support employer mandates to provide healthcare (the way he supported employer mandates for higher minimum wages).
We need to prepare for a referendum!