As We See It: New Proposal On Health Care

Santa Cruz Sentinel


For a few brief moments last week, supporters of Proposition 72 exulted over what seemed to be a come-from-behind victory for the health-care measure that had been on the November ballot.



Proposition 72 was an ill-conceived plan that would force most workers around California to be provided with health-care coverage with no more than a 20 percent share coming out of their own paychecks.



However, the closeness of the vote is enough to prompt two state lawmakers to take on the subject of health care, and promise that they’ll propose a measure in 2005 to extend health-care coverage to all.



Assemblymen Joe Nation , D-San Rafael, and Keith Richman , R-Granada Hills, appeared at the third in a series of conferences last week to listen to a wide variety of health-care workers and experts about what they want for Californians — and what’s economically feasible.



The conference was at UC Berkeley last week, and it was sponsored by a consortium of groups under the coordination of the Communications Institute, a nonprofit consortium of research institutions, scholars and political leaders.



Nation and Richman announced to the audience of 500 that their goal is to offer everyone in the state access to at least a basic package of health-care coverage.



Obviously, the lawmakers will be working on this huge issue in the months to come. And there are a number of questions that must be answered, like:



Can the gridlocked California Legislature see its way past petty political differences and actually come to a far-reaching agreement?



Perhaps that final question is the knottiest of all. Both Nation and Richman commented in private conversations that the distance between Republicans and Democrats is wide and growing wider all the time.



In addition, members of the Legislature worry about their short-term achievements in a climate of term limits. Too many legislators aren’t willing to take on the big issues — like health care — and instead concentrate on smaller matters over which they can claim success.



Members of the audience as well as speakers at the meeting were largely from health-care and public-health backgrounds, and they addressed the issue of why health care has grown so expensive.



Laurence Baker, a health researcher from Stanford, reminded the audience that health care has become more expensive largely because of advances in technology. For example, MRI technology was unheard of a generation ago, and today it’s a key part of bringing care to those who need it.



Health care in the is more expensive than elsewhere, including , because this country offers a higher (and more expensive) level of care.



Yet there are ways to be economical about health care, speakers said. Economist Richard Scheffler of UC Berkeley pointed out that any new system will have to be adequately complex address realities such as this one: "that 20 percent of the people make up 80 percent of the cost of health care."



Assemblymen Nation and Richman have amassed a tremendous amount of information from this and other conferences. They’ll try to put what they’ve heard into a proposal for Californiain upcoming months.



Whether they’ll have a realistic answer or not, this venture makes a lot more sense than simply drawing up a measure like Proposition 72. It’s too soon to know whether the Nation-Richman plan will make sense, but they’re going about it the right way.