California Health Care Bill is a Disaster

Written by: pinetrees on Dec 21, 2007 10:12 AM EST

As usual, the mass media has picked up California's health care bill with its usual superficiality and buzz-word reporting. When you look at the details, the bill, passed by non-progressive Republicans in association with the ultra-right Schwarzenegger (who opposes lunch breaks for workers).

The bill would require people who do not have insurance to buy the state plan's insurance. The problem is that it sets up the amount it thinks people should be able to pay. The premium amounts are set up as a percentage of income.

Let us look at the case of a person earning $40,000 per year. Five percent of that person's income per year is $2000. Suddenly a person earning $40,000 per year is supposed to have $2000 per year for premiums. People who can't afford the premiums have the right to have an appeal process. This means that some bureaucrat gets to decide what an individual can or cannot afford. This sounds like more and more like the bankruptchy bill that has resulted in thousands of foreclosures, people losing their homes because they don't get the flexibility to control their debt repayment.

What happens during all of the months during the appeal process? The bills keep coming. The food stamp program is already one program in which bureaucrats decide what a person can or can't pay for food. The price of auto insurance is not allowed into the person's budget calculation. How many people can get to work without having car insurance? Are these bureaucrats going to make judgments about how much a person should or shouldn't be paying for housing, ordering people to live in substandard housing so that they can afford what the bureaucrats say they should pay? What is going to happen when some company in Silicon Valley suddenly lays off 5000 people? Who is going to process all of these unemployment claims and how long will it take for people to get their rates changed? Will their income for the past six months determine what they pay, even though their income has dropped to almost nothing?

Getting the wrong kind of plan is worse than nothing, because it creates the appearance that something was accomplished, and then the media will tire of the issue and no attention will be paid to it. Call your state legislators' offices and the California speaker's office and go over all of the details.

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