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."
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