Guaranteed Healthcare

Speaker Fabian Nunez went to the LA Times editorial board last week to tell them about the big plans he and Arnold Schwarzenegger are dreaming up: to take their hasty, half-cooked, gift-to-the-insurance-industry-masquerading-as-a-healthcare-reform-plan straight to the voters as a ballot initiative next year.

Not so fast.  A new poll release today by the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee finds considerable unease among the California public over the Schwarzenegger-Nunez plan.  It would likely start out under 50% in the polls, and face an uphill struggle that would only get harder as voters learn about the opposition from the state’s nurses and healthcare activists.

This is a high-stakes issue not just for patients in California, but also for the future direction of the movement for healthcare reform around the country.  Fortunately, voters have smelled the rat.…

Greenberg Quinlan Rosner surveyed 700 voters on behalf of the California Nurses Association about the Schwarzenegger-Nunez healthcare plan.  It finds that Voters don’t want a bad bill just for the sake of having a bill; they don’t want a bill born from a dirty political deal; and they don’t want a bill that simply won’t work.  The toplines:

More than two-thirds of California voters – a margin of 68 percent to 25 percent – said they prefer “making sure we pass healthcare reform that gets it right and improves the system, and not take the risk of passing bad legislation.”

More worrisome for the prospects of a ballot initiative:

In the Greenberg Quinlan poll, when provided a favorable description of AB 8, a plurality, but not a majority, of voters said they supported the bill, by a 49-40 percent.
But once voters were told of serious flaws in the bill, opposition rose to 50 percent while support fell to just 35 percent. And, when told it was opposed by nurses, opposition climbed further to 57 percent while support fell to just 25 percent.

Any ballot initiative that starts under 55% support is likely to lose.  But if voters had the option of voting for real reform, things might be different:

By contrast, by a huge margin of 70 percent to 21 percent, voters said they would be willing to pay more for a health plan that covered everyone, had no co-pays or deductibles, wasn’t attached to one’s job, and guaranteed choice of doctor or hospital. That’s the approach reflected in Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s SB 840 single-payer bill.

Further, that approach won support among voters across political lines, by Democrats, 77-13 percent; independents, 72-20 percent; and Republicans 60-32 percent.

And, of course, ethical concerns are key here:

Two-thirds of the voters, 67 percent, said they would have a less favorable opinion of their legislator if they learned he or she was supporting AB 8 “for political reasons” to seek Gov. Schwarzenegger’s backing for the term limits initiative, to 15 percent who said they would have a more favorable opinion.

In case you missed the LA Times story Saturday about the grand Nunez-Scwharzenegger deal here it is:

"I think we're on the verge of doing something huge," Nuñez told The Times' editorial board Friday.

The plan would require all Californians to have insurance and would give subsidies to those unable to afford coverage. It would also address the problems of the private insurance market

In other words, Californians would be driven into the arms of the for-profit insurance industry exposed in Sicko.  And despite the line above, there is no way to make this equation affordable— as the Massachusetts mandate mess made clear.

The tragedy here is that these politicians are playing games while we have a historic opportunity to rid our healthcare system of the insurance industry that is poisoning it.  Sen. Sheila Kuehl’s SB 840 is based on the very systems that are succeeding in every other industrialized democracy in the world.  And don’t miss Sen. Kuehl’s explanation for why magical thinking won’t fix our healthcare mess.