Dan Walters: If you liked the energy fiasco ...

Philosopher George Santayana said it best: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

A bit of political history was repeated Monday when the state Assembly voted 46-31 along party lines for an immense new health care scheme without knowing whether it would work, or even how it would work – very much like the Legislature enacted a far-reaching energy "deregulation" scheme in 1996 that turned out to be a humongous disaster.

The 1996 energy legislation had been written in private by a few politicians and lobbyists for "stakeholders" and then presented as a fait accompli to the Legislature, which passed it unanimously. No lawmaker had the guts to demand its details, force its promoters to justify the underlying assumptions or ask about its downside risks, which turned out to be many.

The health care legislation that the Assembly approved Monday at the behest of Speaker Fabian Núñez was also worked out in private negotiations, then dropped into the hopper late last week. The Assembly Appropriations Committee conducted a pro forma hearing and gave party-line approval, even though, as one critic, Donna Gerber of the California Nurses Association, observed, "You don't know what's in the bill."

"This bill is going to cure an illness California currently faces, with a health care system that is teetering on collapse," Speaker Núñez told the hearing. "And it is going to replace our failing health care system with one that provides dignity, hope and respect for most Californians."

Those words and the others that he and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger uttered later sound great, but they also sound very much like what the promoters of the 1996 energy bill said about the benefits it would bring to Californians. And if anything, the Núñez-Schwarzenegger deal is even less transparent than the energy measure.

For one thing, the all-important financing component of what Núñez described as a $14.4 billion expansion of health care for millions of Californians who now lack it is completely missing.

Núñez and Schwarzenegger say it will be financed by levies on employers and hospitals, a new cigarette tax, payments from consumers under a new mandatory insurance section and federal funds, but details would be written later and placed before voters next year. And it's highly likely that requiring employers to pay 1 percent to 6.5 percent of their payroll into health care violates long-standing federal law, as courts have held in other states.

For another, the details on how the health insurance mandate would affect employers, consumers and others would be left to an obscure bureaucracy.

So why, one wonders, would the governor and the speaker push an incomplete, unclear and legally questionable health plan, especially when they face an immense deficit in the state budget that Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata rightly says should be addressed first?

Political ego. The two politicians said they'd do it this year, so with two weeks remaining in the year they wanted to claim to have done something – no matter that it is, at best, a work-in-progress that has generated as much opposition as it has support, with labor unions, consumer groups, employers and health care groups divided by ideology and self-interest.

It's a lousy way to make public policy that could affect the lives of millions of Californians – just like the ill-conceived, sloppily written energy scheme 11 years ago. If this is worth doing, it's worth doing right, not as a cheesy stunt a few days before Christmas that, incidentally, cost taxpayers about $20,000 in expenses.

The good news is that the Senate, five of whose members cast votes for that disastrous energy bill as Assembly members, is moving more deliberately and has delayed any action until next year.

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• Call The Bee's Dan Walters, (916) 321-1195. Back columns, www.sacbee.com/walters