Governor: Time to 'regroup'

It's not over for a health care plan for California, as far as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez are concerned.

Despite the failure of their $14.9 billion package in the state Senate on Monday, the governor and the speaker said Tuesday they would find out what went wrong with their proposal and promised to subject any rival plan to the same tough scrutiny that ultimately ravaged their Assembly Bill AB X1 1.

"I wish I could be standing here in front of you today with the Senate having passed our health care reform," Schwarzenegger said at the Sacramento Press Club luncheon. "But just because the Senate has missed this golden opportunity and did not pass our health care reform doesn't mean that we should walk away from reforming our broken health care system."

Schwarzenegger was later joined by Núñez, D-Los Angeles, at a Capitol news conference where the Republican governor pledged to "regroup" with the speaker and more than two dozen representatives from labor, consumer, hospital and insurance groups to keep pushing a comprehensive plan that would provide universal coverage to the bulk of California's 5.1 million uninsured residents.

The governor did not lay out their strategy other than to say their first step will be "to find out exactly" what undid his bill. He suggested that there was something "underneath" the reasons given by opponents of the plan who claimed it would be too costly over time, hidden in "sublayers" and "different colors."

"We need to find out all that because it makes it easier then to get to the bottom and find solutions to the problem," Schwarzenegger said.

Schwarzenegger provided no theories of his own on the sublayers.

A spokeswoman for state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, who opposed the final health care bill, said the only sublayer the governor needs to be looking at is the $14.5 billion state budget deficit.

"Our motivation was his budget, and it was no more complicated than that," Perata spokeswoman Alicia Trost said.

Núñez suggested that support for a government-run, "single-payer" system lurked in the background and wound up undermining AB X1 1.

Schwarzenegger vetoed a government-run proposal in 2006. Another single-payer measure, Senate Bill 840 by Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, is pending in the Assembly.

Núñez vowed to subject it to the same kind of scrutiny his now-dead plan received. "I think it's time," he said, "for us to have an honest conversation about single payer."

He said that lawmakers "cannot create the false sense of hope that we can do something better if it hasn't been tested and put through the same type of scrutiny that our effort was put through."

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