Senator Seeks to Delay Stem Cell Bonds

I could easily have titled this “Sorry Folks, But My Personal Agenda (which doesn’t have a chance of surviving) Is More Important Than Finding a Cure to What is Killing You”, but that was a little too long for our blogging software. However, you get the idea.

California State Senator Deborah Ortiz (D-Sacramento) is trying to accomplish what social conservatives and Senate Republicans were unable to do in the last California election—stop California’s stem cell research initiative. Like social conservatives, Ortiz’s objections are based on ideology. Hers are not religious but social. Ortiz contends that the measure (which was approved overwhelmingly by California voters) fails to guarantee that poor people would benefit from any research gains.This is disturbing for so many reasons that even her fellow Democrats are scratching their heads wondering if she is that far removed from the mainstream.

First: the $3 billion dollar initiative is to fund research. Ortiz evidently believes that by adding a little rider to the process that says that the state shall make available any therapy available to poor people that the insanely difficult problem of medical costs will go away. It’s kind of scarey to think that she thinks that this might actually be a viable solution.

“You are going to try to solve something that none of us in decades has been able to … solve,” said Kessler, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner.

Second: All Ortiz will accomplish is delaying the beginning of much needed research. So far, the state has been unable to sell the $3 billion in bonds because of lawsuits aimed at blocking Proposition 71. The state generally will not sell bonds — and investors won’t buy them — if lawsuits threaten to invalidate measures authorizing their sale. I’d like to see the reaction of patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases to her grandstanding.

Third: Ortiz is mixing apples and oranges. The beauty of the initiative is that it served one extremely important purpose, conducting focused research that would save lives. Ortiz’s possibly well-meaning but ultimately counter-productive actions just bring more politics into the mix increasingly the likelihood of the initiatives objectives not being met.One can only wonder why Ortiz stopped at the needs of low-income people. Why did she refrain from insuring that researcher dollars be allocated on the basis of race and sex? Why aren’t grants required to be limited to research institutions that are “carbon neutral”? Aren’t these important issues too?

Send Deborah an email (Senator.Ortiz@sen.ca.gov) if like her fellow Democrats — including Sen. Joe Dunn of Santa Ana and Sen. Jackie Speier of Hillsborough — you think she is dead wrong on this one.