California Single Payer is dead….for the time being
Fatal flaws led to its swift demise in the state’s Assembly.
I recently reported that California Senate Bill 562, which would establish a single payer healthcare system within the state, had recently cleared a major hurdle by passing through a state legislative committee.
However, the measure died upon entering the California Assembly.
A high-profile effort to establish a single-payer healthcare system in California sputtered Friday when Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount) decided to shelve the proposal.
Rendon announced late Friday afternoon that the bill, Senate Bill 562 by state Sens. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Toni Atkins (D-San Diego), would not advance to a policy hearing in his house, making it all but certain the measure will not be acted upon this year.
“SB 562 was sent to the Assembly woefully incomplete,” Rendon said in a statement. “Even senators who voted for SB 562 noted there are potentially fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities of needed action by the Trump administration and voters to make SB 562 a genuine piece of legislation.”
Of course, not everyone was happy about that development:
Leaders of the California Nurses Association were livid, calling the timing of the announcement “cowardly” and Rendon’s message “disingenuous.”
“Whose interest is he acting on behalf of if not the insurance industry and those who oppose having guaranteed health care?” asked Chuck Idelson, a spokesman for the association. “It’s really quite stunning.”
But another strong supporter of the bill, Laphonza Butler, president of the Service Employees International Union of California, offered a less harsh assessment. She said in a statement Friday that the bill “has opened up a crucial conversation about how California should proceed in the face of these federal attacks on our health care.”
Governor Brown chimed in, agreeing that the measure was “woefully incomplete”.
Gov. Jerry Brown, who had signaled wariness about the proposal’s costs, said in a statement that Rendon “made the case that there’s clearly more work to do before anyone is in a position to vote on revamping California’s healthcare system.”
“I recognize the tremendous excitement behind the measure, but basic and fundamental questions remain unanswered,” Brown said.
A clue to how bad the measure was may be had in the rather public way this bill met its end, at the hands of the state’s Assembly Speaker.
“I think the surprise is that he didn’t kill it quietly through the suspense process,” said Thad Kousser, a political science professor at UC San Diego, referring to the “suspense file” where appropriations committees often place costly bills and decide their fate all at once. “That’s where expensive bills go to die without anyone having to take a public stand against them.”
While I hope that California single payer is completely dead, I am almost certain it will be resurrected again…especially if the GOP bill passes. My home state’s politicians are nothing if not consistent about defying the current President.
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So, since when did Democrats ever care about “financing, delivery of care, cost controls, or the realities”?
When it is they who will be held accountable by the voters. There was no way to blame Republicans when(not if) this bill failed to do as advertised and when(not if)the cost exploded far beyond projections
What? They’ve denied millions of people health care by not passing this bill! They’re killers I tell ya, baby killers! They’re pushing granny off the cliff!
You mean there isn’t a magic money tree in Sacramento?
It’s always fun to watch when leftists are slapped in the face with reality.
“Fatal flaws in the bill, including the fact it does not address many serious issues, such as financing.”
So what if it doesn’t address financing. A minor detail in the utopia that is California! 😉
WAJ is right, this horse ain’t dead. Liberals regard single-payer similar to how they regard socialism – it will work if the right people are running it, that all previous failures of single-payer and socialism were the result of pilot error. They see themselves, of course, as the better pilots, the ones that can make it all work. It is lost on them that all previous pilots felt the same way.
“WAJ is right, this horse ain’t dead.” Doesn’t anyone ever read the bylines on these posts? Good post, Leslie.
What is it inside you that makes you delight in pointing out minor and irrelevant errors in others’ posts? You act like it’s a chronic problem that’s bedogged you forever.
You’re right, it’s a trivial issue, if not to Leslie herself then the rest of us. No, I don’t take any malicious delight in pointing out minor things.
It’s merely something I’ve seen repeated over and over at LI.
Well, let LI know if you need a safe space for when these horrible things happen.
Kalifornia was never going to pass a single payer healthcare bill. In the first place, most of the politicians in the state are not delusional enough to believe that the state could fund the system. This “bill” was designed to gin up the liberal weenie, belly up to the public trough, something for nothing Democrat base. Kalifornia will simply wait for the US Congress to do the job for them.
Smoke and mirrors.