December 20, 2007

Newsom: health plan needs ' major reconstructive surgery'

It's a brave new world when prominent elected officials are announcing their positions on landmark legislation on blogs.

Welcome to that world.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom layed out a critique of the legislation passed out of the Assembly this week, negotiated by the speaker and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. He wrote his opinion on Calitics, the left-leaning group blog.

Newsom, who is a supporter of Sen. Sheila Kuehl's single-payer plan, criticizes the plan from the left:

The first problem: there is not nearly enough cost control. Under the proposal, almost all Californians would have to buy health insurance - but there are not sufficient guarantees that the insurance polices are going to be affordable.

...

Another unacceptable risk: not enough protections against "dumping." This plan needs real barriers to prevent big companies that hire low-wage workers (like WalMart) from merely pushing the health care burden onto taxpayers.

Yet another flaw: the plan is unclear about how it will provide sufficient coverage to undocumented workers. How can we even be talking about a "universal" plan that could leave out millions of people?

Perhaps more fundamentally, Newsom is worried that the proposal takes the state no closer, and maybe even farther, from a single payer system.

"I, for one, am not opposed to interim steps on our way to Single Payer. We all need to understand that building a workable Single Payer system will take time. But I want us to keep moving in the right direction," Newsom blogs.

He ends the entry: "I'm not convinced that this plan, as currently drafted, is moving us toward our ultimate goal of affordable and quality care for everyone."

Posted by Shane Goldmacher on December 20, 2007 11:29 AM