“The bill would make all California residents eligible for specified health care benefits under the California Health Insurance System, which 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. … The bill would prohibit health care service plan contracts or health insurance policies from being issued for services covered by the California Health Insurance System.”

Lefty fantasy? No, it’s a bill, SB 840, which passed the California Senate 24-14 and now awaits action by the Assembly!

The Los Angeles Times has not written about the bill at all, even though it’s sponsored by Santa Monica Democrat Sheila Kuehl. You have to go to the Sacramento Bee for coverage.

Prop 186, a similar single payer scheme, was blown out of the water in the 1994 election, winning only 27% of the vote. Yet Kuehl must believe that she is channeling the will of the electorate in moving her bill forward.

All these single payer plans come with promises of fantastic efficiencies. To counter that, look at the example of Kaiser Permanente. KP is a vertically integrated health plan that runs its own hospitals and clinics and employs its own doctors and other staff. It has over 8 million members. You would think that this would offer the perfect solution to insurance bureaucracy, since there should be none. Every person involved in your health care is a Kaiser employee; no third parties are involved. KP is a single payer. Yet every time this writer has priced health plans for his company, Kaiser comes out a little more expensive than the alternative private insurance plans. And Kaiser doesn’t even have to make a profit! The wonderful cost savings will not happen — particularly when a Democratic-controlled state legislature won’t be able to stop itself from giving health care away for free, driving up demand.

Single-payer advocates inevitably bring up the example of the Canadian system. According to one study sympathetic to the Canadian system, that country spends 8.7% of GDP on health care on 100% of its population, while the U.S. spends 11.8% for incomplete coverage. Canada does this by 1) paying health professionals, especially doctors, substantially less than in the U.S.; 2) investing much less in advanced technology; and 3) rationing care. Canada’s own Supreme Court ruled last week that the delays in the system amounted to a human rights violation.

Oh, and the Bee notes that the bill conveniently “does not include a funding solution.”

The solution is not to make the state responsible for health care, but the individual. If people can be trusted to purchase their own car insurance, why not health care? They know their own best interest — not their employer, who currently buys their health insurance for them, and certainly not the State of California.

[Dan Weintraub at the Bee has similar thoughts here.]

Technorati Tags: California, government waste, LA Times, Los Angeles Times, health care

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 15th, 2005 at 5:00 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under California Schemin', Your Tax Dollars In Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.