Sheila Kuehl has announced a plan to offer single-payer all-encompassing health care for everyone in California. With amazing comic timing, she’s doing at a time when the state is reeling from a half-decade of insane government overspending combined with political gridlock on taxes. From The Bee:
Kuehl said the legislation would provide more services to more Californians by slashing administrative costs and enabling the state to negotiate lower prices for pharmaceuticals.
The legislation “sets up health care insurance through the state,” Kuehl said. “Each person and each business would pay into that.”
The system would be headed by an elected commissioner. Eligibility would be conferred based on residency, a provision that opponents said would encourage people with existing illnesses to move to California.
Kuehl’s legislation seeks to combine all federal, state and county money spent on health care with payroll taxes and eliminate patient deductibles and co-payments.
It’s interesting to wonder if Democratic Party strategists think this a good thing; that we’ll make a stand here in California, and see if we can pull the state further to the Blue. Kuehl is safe, because she represents Santa Monica. But boy, is this going to play badly in the rest of California – and boy, is it bad policy. Republican strategists have to be gleeful because from their point of view, they’ve got good templates for where this is going to lead.
From Democratic Governor Phil Breseden of Tennessee:
TennCare began in January 1994 as an experiment to expand Tennessee’s Medicaid program to deliver health care to a larger number of people for the same amount of money. But the program was beset by problems and cost overruns. Over the course of a decade, TennCare grew at an unexpected rate and now consumes roughly one in three dollars in the state budget. Prescription-drug costs are particularly problematic, in part due to the legal constraints. For example, TennCare’s pharmacy benefit in recent years has grown at a rate of 26% annually versus average growth of 17% in neighboring states’ healthcare plans. The total cost of TennCare’s pharmacy benefit ($2.11 billion) now is greater than the cost of Tennessee’s higher education system ($1.89 billion).
Yup, Sheila, you believe that doing this in California – a state with a larger and more litigious population, a larger population of people living in the cash economy, and a larger population of uninsured and elderly than Tennessee is a good idea. But God, I hope you’re the only one.
I think health care is broken in this nation. But, to be honest, it’s broken pretty much everywhere else as well. I’d like to see some kind of radical rethinking of it, but I’d like it to be one based in reality…
A little Google search turned up an article in the SacBee from Oct 2003 – right after we replaced Gov Davis with Gov Schwarzenegger:
“Shiela Kuehl”:http://www.sacbee.com/static/weblogs/insider/archives/000795.html
A sample of her brilliant forecasting:
“This guy has no idea how to run a state. … He’ll have his own ideas and no way to carry them out. I mean he has already proposed three things that the governor cannot do. He wants to roll back the car tax on his own by fiat, which he can t do. He wants to tax the Indians, which he can’t do. He doesn’t know anything about running the state.”
Car tax: rolled back.
Tax the Indians: done deal.
Running the State: Doing OK, considering the Democratic foot-dragging.
Look on the bright side…it can’t be as bad a boondoggle as California’s energy mess under Gray Davis.
On second thought, this probably will be even worse.
To Wit: praktike
I’m surprised nobody in left blogistan seems to have commented on the fact that the NYT “recently busted the Cato Institute in pretty embarrassing fashion.”:http://cheznadezhda.blogharbor.com/blog/_archives/2005/1/18/263840.html
And he went wrong the instant he fell for the new York Times, a gaggle of looney left presenting agenda as news.
Cato is right, the money is all spent, there is no surplus, except in the manner of Maos great Leap Forward, that created a mass famine where 27 Million starved to death.
bq. In China, millions suffered and died because of Mao Tse-Tung’s ideas. Like the Great Leap Forward of 1958, totally unrealistic food production quotas were created. Production figures were thus falsified. Under the delusion that the country had plenty of food, Mao demanded that the people make steel. They did, often using homemade furnaces. The steel, of course, was worthless, the country had not been growing food while producing steel, and the result was a massive famine.
bq. Within a few years all land and farms were taken over by the government, collectives called communes were built, and all farmers became, in effect, not only factory workers, but forced conscripts in a national agricultural army.
bq. In many communes they lived in dormitories, woke to bugles, ate their food in mess halls, and lined up after breakfast to be marched off with flags flying to carry out their group tasks and meet the communes quota.
bq. This was true communism. It was the dream of those who believed that government could build a society to improve the lot of the poor and feed the needy. Here was total reconstruction, the revolution for which Mao tse-tung had worked and fought.
bq. Of course, what this meant was that those communist officials put in charge of a commune or agricultural region, could not afford to underfill their quotas. All, thus, exceeded them and food production soared. China was becoming an agriculturally rich country. The experiment had worked, or so it seemed to the government and to well wishers abroad. But all these statistics were a sham. They were only on paper.
bq. The actual results were absolutely disastrous. Catastrophic. Men, women, and children starved to death in the communes and fields, in the villages and towns, and cities. While food production records were being broken the emaciated bodies began to pile up and soon their numbers, even to top party rulers, became undeniable. By 1962 the worst famine in world history was underway.
I remember when the republicans took congress and got control of the books, and reported that all the money that had came in for SS was gone, spent, and that without its contribution the fed butget itself would be in larger deficit by something like double.
And interest ? paid by who ?
praktike’s idea of surplus,,,
is identical to writing an IOU to yourself and spending every dime of it ( now your bank is empty) and continue every time you get your regular paycheck,,,
booking interest owed to yourself,,
then claiming you will be enriched as soon as you come thru with that promise to yourself to pay yourself back the principl plus the interst you owe yourself.
This same kind of krapthink is seen in the Sheila Kuehl plan.
Some say the fed can fix the SS problem by simply printing more money, but every dollar printed is a unit of debt, and a unit of inflation, so if you double the money supply, the money supply en total is worth the same but every dolar is now worth half as much, or even less, because that kind of thing actually converts paper money into the same thing as those worthless marks the germans burned by the wheeel barrow load to keep warm in berlin one winter..
Leftist cant grok, that the “root-cause” of leftist disaster is removing market forces.
And the more detached a good is from the market forces the more wrong things go …
Never mind that they totaly ignore the objective truth that govt is always the woirst bargan for the money, for eny given good or service, nothing consumes more to deliver less than govt, except perhaps a thug with a gun to your head demanding your money,. oow wait … same thing isnt it.
Her claims to fame are The Dobie Gillis Show and
her long record of moonbattery. She should’ve
stuck with TV. Although, that medium didn’t do
much for her palatability either. Just ask Bob
Denver.
Sheila Kuehl has the right idea here.
Health care costs are out of control, building a program that helps people out and makes the broad populace better off is both good policy and smart politics.
Better than gay marriage, drivers licenses for illegal aliens, and other identity politics of marginal interest to most Californians.
However, it will likely go nowhere since it would require large budget cuts in things that both Parties benefit from (cheap water to the Imperial and San Juaquin valleys, etc). There’s also a big budget fight over the tax structure and revenue sharing with the state and local govs.
But, Kuehl is smart to push this. We need more builders less identity folks.
A tiny query. How did Schwarzenegger tax the Indians? Doesn’t that violate the federal constitution and various treaties?
*sigh* She was my favorite TV character when I was a child. . . .
Nahh, Yvonne Craig (also of Dobie Gillis and Batman fame) was much hotter.
“But, Kuehl is smart to push this. We need more builders less identity folks.”
No, she’s not. The program would be an absolute disaster. You think things are bad now, just wait.
Thorley, I must admit it’s hard to argue with this… (Go to Geocities, then /Hollywood/Hills/5733/eyc013.jpg) but Elizabeth Montgomery trumps ’em both for beauty + charisma. Throw in guts and brains, and what’s not to like?
Does anyone have any concrete statistics on Medi-Cal and how much it costs per child for the state to administer care, etc? I’m 25 and about a year ago bought an individual health insurance plan for less than $100/month and since then have wondered why you can’t just buy individual private health insurance plans for children. From the numbers I’ve seen about expenses for Medicaid, this seems as if it might be cheaper. We could at least make sure all children are covered, but I need to see concrete numbers to check.
I heard of an absolutely brilliant way to save social security.
All that Congress needs to do is to raise the interest rate on the bonds in the lockbox.
If they raised the rate high enough the payroll tax could be eliminated.
In fact if the rate was high enough we could double or tripple the payout.
Some one tell praktike at once.