With the nearly $200 million campaign war being fought between Meg Whitman and Jerry Brown and the shock and awe television barrage that has resulted, many Californians may not be paying attention to one of the most important elections in the state that could affect everyone’s pocket book and the actual security of your job.

The race is for the post of Insurance Commissioner.  The Democratic candidate, Dave Jones, is one of the most—if not the most—liberal members in the State Legislature, and I’m talking about the all-time line ups.  He has proposed one of the most extreme ideas for state-mandated health care in the country that makes the costs of Obamacare look like the equivalent of purchasing ice cream cones from Longs Drug Store.  The LAO did a cost analysis on one of the single-payer health care takeovers co-sponsored by Jones, and the costs are staggering.  State government would have been expanded by nearly two and one half times our current general fund spending AND we would have been saddled with an additional $42 billion annual spending deficit.  Payroll taxes would have had to go up by an annual average of nearly $100 billion over the next 5 years, and more after that.

And who are the people who support Dave Jones in this endeavor, the ones who want to put him in the post of Insurance Commissioner where he could do some real harm in pushing his big-cost, big-government agenda?  The unions and the trial lawyers. 

Yesterday, it was reported by the Secretary of State that Jones’ puppet masters—the trial lawyers and unions—are putting in $145,000 in a last ditch independent expenditure to support their man, Dave Jones.  This is on top of the million-plus in contributions the unions and trial lawyers have already contributed directly to Jones’ campaign.

This is occurring all at the same time Jones has been running around the state holding press conferences criticizing his Republican opponent.

Jones is doing his press shows to deflect attention from his own extremist backers.  Unions want to see bigger government.  Trial lawyers make money—lots of it—off of suing insurance companies, and it’s consumers and businesses that pay for it through higher insurance rates.  And many of the other lawyers giving to Jones make their high hourly rates representing insurance companies before the Insurance Commissioner.  These three groups are giving big to Jones, and it’s one of the most blatant conflicts this state has seen.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 28th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.