September 11, 2007

Twenty minutes?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez committed Tuesday to working on a health care reform package in a special session of the Legislature until they reach a deal that, presumably, they can take to the voters for approval.

“We owe it to the people of California to finish the job that we have started,” Schwarzenegger said.

Nunez said he believed the two of them could reach a deal “in 20 minutes” if it were up to them. But he noted there are plenty of other players -- both in the Legislature and among the interest groups – who will have a day in a any agreement.

One of those players will be Senate Leader Don Perata. Perata has said this week that he wants to begin the next stage of the discussions with a formal consideration of the governor’s proposal -- in bill form. Schwarzenegger never presented his plan as legislation during the regular session, preferring instead to have his staff negotiate with legislative aides and lobbyists in private.

Perata also was out of the loop as the governor and Nunez moved closer to a deal. A spokesman said the Senate leader was not aware of a strategy to take the plan’s financing to the ballot until he read about it in the media. That was partly a product of Perata deferring to Nunez, who was the official author of their combined bill, AB 8. It was also a result of the increasingly close working relationship between Schwarzenegger and Nunez.

That will have to change in the special session if the three are going to come to terms. Perata will have to be intimately involved.

But process aside, the real question is whether Democrats want to seize the opportunity to work with a Republican governor who has proposed a plan that is more comprehensive than their own, and with business groups that are, in an unusual turn of events, clamoring for broad-based tax increases in hopes of avoiding a more narrow employer mandate.

Nunez said Tuesday that for him, “everything is on the table,” including a sales tax, and even the idea of an individual mandate, as long as lower-income and middle-income Californians have access to an “affordable plan” to fulfill any state requirement.

“If and when we have that,” he said, “we can talk.”

Posted by dweintraub on September 11, 2007 4:52 PM