Category: Single Payer Health Care: State Efforts

Berkeley Daily Planet:

“Advocates of single payer health insurance in California are saying that the collapse of the Nuñez-Perata-Schwarzenegger health care bill is a good thing and are moving forward with reviving their own single-payer legislation.

“We were opposed to the Nuñez bill,” Vote Health representative Kay Eisenhower said by telephone this week. “We considered it a step backwards.” Vote Health is an Alameda County-based health care activist organization.

Eisenhower said statewide single-payer health care advocates will be holding a two-day conference in Los Angeles later this month to talk about ways to put State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s (D-Santa Monica-Los Angeles) SB 840 single-payer health care bill back on track. “SB 840’s not dead,” she said. “It’s only on ice.”

Two years ago, it seemed dead. After SB 840 passed the state legislature in 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

Kuehl revived her single payer bill a year later, and the bill passed the Senate on a 23-15 vote and the Assembly Health Committee on a 12-5 vote last summer, but it stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee as attention in the Assembly turned to a compromise bill being put together by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez.

The bill’s summary says it “would establish the California Universal Healthcare System (CUHS) under which all California residents would be eligible for specified health care benefits. The CUHS would, on a single-payer basis, negotiate for or set fees for health care services provided through the system, and pay claims for those services.””

Lawmakers take on single-payer health care backers at rally: Rutland Herald Online:

“But as the crowd grew more raucous (some began interrupting lawmakers and insulting legislative staff), Rep. Patricia O’Donnell, R-Vernon, staged her own interruption as she came to the front of the room and asked people to treat their lawmakers with respect.

‘If you want to be listened to, you have to be respectful,’ O’Donnell, a member of the House Health Care Committee, told the crowd before a chorus of people yelling ‘sit down’ and ‘shut up’ sent her out of the room, the door slamming behind her.

Maier told the crowd the criticism for legislative staff — who have researched aspects of the hospital plan for lawmakers — is off base. He added that while he doesn’t ‘enjoy being yelled at, it is our job to listen and to ask the tough questions and to dig down.’

‘If we don’t ask these kinds of questions we would be irresponsible,’ he said. ‘It’s not our job to pass ideas and concepts.’

Racine also told the crowd that their anger is misplaced and suggested that attention should also be focused on state and elected officials who do not support universal health care. He cited the new proposed budget from Gov. James Douglas, which he said underfunds Medicaid and will result in ‘$5 million in new co-pays and price increases’ for Vermonters.

‘I know the system is not sustainable. It’s a national crisis,’ Racine said. ‘If some folks have ideas on how to make this work, I’m all ears.'”

Going “Colonial” in Vermont…