Rapping the individual mandate

Glen Whitman, an econ professor at CSU Northridge, makes a strong case here against the individual mandate in health insurance.

Water talks

At a press conference with the governor today on prison reform, Sen. Mike Machado gave a quick description of the status of the water bond negotiations. He sounded pretty optimistic that the Legislature would reach a bipartisan agreement. Here is what Machado said:

The plan is for the Senate to convene on October the 4th for the hearing on the bond proposals that are being developed, and it's anticipated that there will be a bill moved from that that would go to the Floor to be heard in early October. The collaboration that's existing between the Legislature and the Governor's Office now is very productive, and there is a sense of urgency. But there's also a sense of urgency and quality, to make sure that the package that get's put forward before the people in February is indeed going to address the problem of the Delta and water supply beyond the Delta. So yes, there is a lot of work being done, and there will be a Legislature back in time to be able to act on it.

Prison receiver posts new report

Robert Sillen, the federal court receiver overseeing medical care in the state prisons, has posted his latest report to the judge who appointed him. You can find it here.

How conservative is your governor?

The conservative Web site FlashReport.org has posted another list of 20 bills it says the governor should veto. Last year, Schwarzenegger rejected 14 of the 20 bills on the Web site's hit list.

FlashReport breaks down this year's list of 20 into four categories: nanny government bills, overreaching environmental bills, tax dollars for illegal immigrants bills and a catch-all "other" category.

I am going to go out on a limb here and say I think Schwarzenegger will veto at least 15 of the 20 bills this year, and perhaps as many as 18. I think the bills he is most likely to sign are two flood control bills (AB 162 and SB 5) and possibly one gun bill (AB 1471), which would require semi-automatic handguns to use technology that would microstamp an identifiable code onto the spent cartridge when the gun is fired.

This year's tally by FlashReport, though, is rigged a little bit, because the site is excluding from its count three bills they hate but which the governor has already said he would veto: the Democrats' health care bill (AB 8), Perata's anti-war ballot measure (SB 924) and Mark Leno's gay marriage bill (AB 43). It's funny that these are probably the three bills passed this year that are at the top of any conservative veto list, and the guv will veto them, but FlashReport will exclude that from its evaluation of his full performance. That's a great example of how the Republican right wing devalues Schwarzenegger's centrism: they take for granted the right-leaning stuff he does that they like while focusing tons of venom on the left-leaning actions he takes that they hate.

Given everything that has been said and written about Schwarzenegger's leftward tilt, it will be interesting to see how this turns out. He could very well veto 19 of these 20 bills, and 21 of the 23 top targets of the most conservative Republican web site in California. At the least he is almost certain to veto more than half of the bills. That must say something about where Schwarzenegger really stands, about how far to the left the Democrats in the Legislature are, or both.

Reversal of Fortunes

The wealthy, in California and New York. From a book that examines the trends over time on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans.

Paging Michael Moore

When was the last time you heard about an American legislator going to Canada for surgery? Maybe Michael Moore should have interviewed this liberal Canadian MP who came to California for breast cancer surgery, because she wanted the best.

It just keeps getting better

Gotta love it. Alfred Beardsley, one of the alleged victims of OJ's Vegas caper was a parolee from California, and he's now been arrested for violating his parole by leaving the state without permission. His original crime? Stalking. We are not making this up.

From The state Department of Corrections:

Beardsley was sentenced to prison in California under the commitment offense of stalking (Penal Code Section 646.9 (A)-Stalking), and is a first term offender received by CDCR on April 26, 2005, for a two-year sentence. He served the majority of his time at North Kern Sate Prison. His initial parole date was March 15, 2006, and his scheduled date for discharge from parole was March 15, 2009.

State implements prison guard contract

The state has just announced that it will implement its final offer to the CCPOA for a new, three-year contract with the prison guards. The offer, which was rejected by the union, includes 5 percent raises each of the next three years, an increase in the state's share of health care premiums, higher recruitment bonuses for employees who bring in new guards, and more money for guards working the night shift. The contract also promises a crackdown on the use and abuse of sick leave and essentially eliminates the right of officers to have their grievances settled by arbitration. You can read the state's letter to the union's members here.

First Hill, now Bill

This morning we remarked on how Hillary Clinton's health plan was similar to a hypothetical hybrid of the plans proposed by Gov. Schwarzenegger and Democratic legislative leaders. But that's not the governor's only Clinton connection. On Wednesday he is scheduled to appear with the former President at Columbia Middle School in El Monte on behalf of the Alliance for a Healthier Generation. The program preaches healthy living to kids and encourages them to develop "lifelong healthy habits." Hmm. Schwarzenegger, maybe. But Clinton? Not the first image that comes to mind when I think of a healthy lifestyle.

Endless Summers

Interesting discussion on Harvard Professor Greg Mankiw's blog about the UC Regents' decision to uninvite Larry Summers to speak at their dinner Wednesday night. It is funny how a decision never to invite Summers, based on the same complaints against him, would not have been notable, but to back away from an invite that already has been issued becomes a much bigger thing. And here is the story from the Davis Enterprise describing reaction to the decision from one of the Davis professors who led the petition drive.

Meanwhile, Chemerinsky is back as dean of the fledgling UC Irvine law school...

...and Stanford faculty are protesting Rummy's appointment at the Hoover Institution. Somehow I don't see the Hoover folks caving.

ClintonCare = CaliCare?

Hillary Clinton laid out her health care proposal today, and given her history with the issue, the plan will clearly draw some intense scrutiny in the days and weeks ahead. But the first thing I noticed was how similar it looked to the conceptual outline of a plan for California that could emerge from the negotiations between Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democratic legislative leadership.

Clinton's plan includes an individual mandate, an employer mandate, a requirement that insurers sell policies to anyone who applies without regard to pre-existing conditions, community rating regulations, a new risk-sharing pool, subsidies and tax credits for the working poor and new taxes, in Clinton's case on people earning more than $250,000 a year. She even uses the phrase "shared responsibility" -- a favorite of the governor's -- to describe the financing of her plan.

Clinton is taking a risk in proposing the individual mandate, but she's also trying to sell the proposal as one that enhances choice for consumers by letting everybody buy into a pool that would offer the same benefits now available to federal employees. Consumers would choose from a menu of private plans with different benefit packages, providers and costs. She would also offer a publicly managed plan along the lines of what Medicare offers now, which she says would be cheaper because it would have lower administrative costs than private plans. Her proposal for a national pool, while optional for consumers, and her "Medicare for all" option clearly go further in terms of expanding government's role than anything contemplated in California -- other than SB 840, the single-payer model that Sen. Kuehl shelved in the Legislature this year.

UC Irvine steps in it

UC Irvine is starting a new law school, and they're starting it with a dumb move. The school offered and then withdrew the offer of the dean's job to Erwin Chemerinsky, a nationally respected constitutional law scholar who happens to be a liberal. Too liberal for Orange County, according to this OC Register story, which says the Duke University professor was told his hiring was provoking protest from the community. Funny thing is one of his biggest fans is John Eastman, the very conservative dean of Chapman University's law school, who says withdrawing the offer was a "huge misstep" by UCI and adds that he is now recruiting Chemerinsky to come to his school instead.

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.”

CCPOA looking to Legislature to extend contract

The Schwarzenegger Administration says there is a move afoot in the Legislature to extend the CCPOA contract that expired last year for two more years. A Department of Finance analysis released Monday says doing so would cost $636 million in 2007-08, including some one-time costs. It would also circumvent collective bargaining and effectively reverse the recent court decision that said the state was not bound to keep correctional officer salaries within $666 a month of the CHP. That is the deal former Gov. Gray Davis signed with the union before he was recalled from office. The analysis is here.

The scary thing is that even if this gambit fails, the final deal the guards are likely to get, one way or another, won't likely be significantly smaller. I am guessing it will probably be in the neighborhood of $400 million a year, or more.

Which Republicans?

As California Republican activists gather near Palm Springs for a weekend convention, much has been and will be written about Schwarzenegger's relationship with "the party," and the widely held perception that he is at odds with many if not most of his fellow Republicans.

That's true, of course, if by the party you mean the Republican members of the Legislature, the delegates to the state conventions and the activists who write for conservative blogs. But is it true of California Republicans generally?

The most recent PPIC poll had Schwarzenegger's approval rating among Republicans at 75-17. On environmental issues, for which he has been much criticized by the party faithful, his rating among Republican voters was 62-19.

The most recent Field Poll had Schwarzenegger's rating among Republicans at 69-23.

Schwarzenegger also won a significantly greater share of the Republican vote in last year's election than did either Dan Lungren in 1998 or Bill Simon in 2002, even though both men were far more conservative.

His problems, then, don't really seem to be with Republican voters as much as with Republican activists. Maybe we should be asking the activists not only why they despise the governor so much but why they appear to be so out of step with their fellow Republican voters.

'Thank you' would take even longer

Yesterday I wondered whether adding pleasantries to the service at the DMV might slow down the clerks. Maybe so. The Division of Labour blog, which daily excerpts 100-year-old items from the New York Times, found this gem yesterday from the NYT of Sept. 6 1907:

Hereafter the 450 girl operators of the Keystone Telephone Company of this city will not say "please" to the subscribers, and the subscribers have been requested not to say "please" to the operators.

A.J. Ulrich, traffic manager of the company, has issued the order, and both the girls and the subscribers are happy with the new arrangement. According to Mr. Ulrich the girls in answering calls and the patrons in making them use the word "please" 900,000 times every twenty-four hours. Estimating that it requires half a second to say the word, 7,500 minutes are consumed every twenty-four hours, which is equal to 125 hours lost every day by the use of the word.

Hospital fee

The hospital association support for the governor's proposed fee on their operations could be a turning point in the health care debate. It puts a major player in the health care system in Schwarzenegger's camp and demonstrates the power of his "shared responsibility" theme. If approved, it would also bring an extra $1.7 billion into the system from the federal government. Speaker Nunez has said he wants to take the fee revenue and the federal match and tack it onto the proposal put foward by him and Sen. Perata, while keeping their proposed mandate on employers and a 7.5 percent tax on companies that do not provide insurance. But the Democrats know that will never fly with the governor. This devleopment should spur them all toward finding common ground.

Credit where it's due

I've been plenty critical of state, local and school bureaucracies when they screw up. So it's only fair that I mention my experience this morning at the DMV when I went in to renew my driver's license.

I had an appointment for 9:50 a.m. I arrived at 9:40, was called at 9:46 and was done with the paperwork and the picture, and out the door, by 9:55.

Now that's service.

My only beef, and it's a minor one, would be with the attitude of the clerks. They still make zero attempt to treat the customer like a human being. No smiles. No pleasantries. Just process the work and move on. Maybe that's how they have speeded things up, so I shouldn't complain. But does a smile and a how-are-you really slow you down?

Going Dutch

The WSJ has a good piece today on Holland's new health care plan, which sounds a lot like what Schwarzenegger is proposing for California. It's built around an individual mandate and subsidies for those who can't afford coverage, and it maintains a private market for insurance plans.

An excerpt:

The Dutch system features two key rules: All adults must buy insurance, and all insurers must offer a policy to anyone who applies, no matter how old or how sick. Those who can't afford to pay the premiums get help from the state, financed by taxes on the well-off.

The system hinges on competition among insurers. They are expected to cut premiums, persuade consumers to live healthier lives, and push hospitals to provide better and lower-cost care.

Some are already taking unusual steps. The insurance company Menzis has opened three of its own primary-care centers to serve the patients it insures, and plans to open dozens more in a move to lower costs. Rival UVIT offers discount vouchers to customers who buy low-cholesterol versions of yogurt, butter and milk.

To prevent insurers from seeking only young, healthy customers, the government compensates insurers for taking on higher-risk patients. Insurers get a "risk-equalization" payment for covering the elderly and those with certain conditions such as diabetes.

Schwarzenegger, Lowenthal on container fee

The governor and Sen. Lowenthal have worked out a truce on SB 974, the container fee legislation for the ports. Lowenthal has agreed to pull the bill and Schwarzenegger has said he agrees in concept with the idea of levying a fee on containers moving through the ports to pay for environmental mitigation and -- this is key -- to speed the movement of goods. They will work out the details this fall and come back with a bill after the start of the new year.

Here is the statement:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Senator Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach) issued the following statement regarding SB 974 port container fee legislation.

"Our ports are an integral component of goods movement in and out of California. I support the concept of SB 974 and want to work together with Senator Lowenthal on the bill so it addresses the future of goods movement while also reducing environmental impacts. I look forward to working during the fall recess with the Senator, his fellow legislators and all interested parties to craft a solution that will protect California's air quality and also facilitate the goods movement through California," said Governor Schwarzenegger.

"I am pleased that the Governor understands the need to fund air quality improvements and rail infrastructure, especially grade separations. I accept the Governor's offer to work together and make SB 974 a reality." stated Lowenthal.

SB 974 would impose a fee on all container cargo going in and out of the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and Oakland. The revenue from that fee would fund projects that would alleviate pollution of containerized cargo moved to and from these ports and improve the movement of such cargo in California.

Everybody say 'ahhh'

John Edwards wants to require not only that everybody have health insurance, but that everybody see a doctor. That seems to be taking things a bit far. No details on how he would enforce it. Maybe house calls?

Cali's electoral votes

George Skelton is right that the Republicans are trying to snag -- George says "rig" -- the next election by changing the way California allocates its electoral votes. But isn't there at least a slight chance that Giuliani will be the Republican nominee, and have a chance to win California? In which case, he would be the one forfeiting votes, not the Democrats. The law of unintended consequences, big time. I guess the folks behind the initiative figure that if a Republican wins California, he would be so dominant nationally that the 30 or so votes he gives away here if their measures passes wouldn't matter. But still, that's a lot of votes to give away.