December 21, 2007

Explained: The deadline for a health deal

As the governor and legislative leaders hustle to negotiate a major overhaul of health care in California, there is one recurring question: When exactly is the drop-dead date for a final deal to be put on the November 2008 ballot?

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez have pushed for a completed package this year. The Assembly, in fact, voted out a health plan on Monday in a party-line vote.

But Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata has said he won’t take up the legislation until he has an analysis on the impact of the plan on the state’s precarious budget, which is $14 billion in the red, approximately the cost of the health plan.

The only consistent thing about the deadline, meanwhile, has been its inconsistency.

In early December, the speaker’s office insisted a floor session be held on Dec. 5 or 6 – despite a planned GOP retreat because "deadlines are deadlines," referring to the November ballot.

The session was cancelled.

Then, on Dec. 13, Nunez himself set today, Dec. 21, as the drop-dead deadline to finish health care.

But today will come and go, and negotiations are scheduled to continue into 2008.

The source of the confusion is the statutory calendar to qualify an initiative, which requires, as the first step, receiving title and summary for any measure from the attorney general (which can take up to seven weeks after submission).

The calendar suggests that the last day for proponents to submit a proposed measure for the November ballot to the Attorney General's office was Oct. 1. But the truth is that there is more time to get something qualified - as long as you have more money.

Perata has said that if the governor and speaker are so worried about making the November 2008 ballot, they could submit ballot language now, before the Senate takes up the legislation.

“We don’t need to pass a bill for the initiative process to begin. They could file the title and summary tomorrow, or today, if they wanted to,” said Perata spokeswoman Alicia Trost.

The speaker's office doesn't agree. "If the Senate alters anything, anything they do is likely to add to the costs so we would be back to where we started (redrafting funding language)," said Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Núñez.

The central portion of the would-be initiative is the funding of the health package (read: the hospital tax, the tobacco tax and the employer fee), which isn’t part of the legislation anyway because Republicans won’t vote for it (and their votes would be needed).

Problem is, there’s no done deal on the funding, as the speaker and governor haven’t publicly announced an agreement on the size of the tobacco tax (the speaker wants $2 per pack, the governor $1.50).

“Those decision haven’t been made,” noted Trost.

Schwarzenegger spokesman Adam Mendelsohn indicated the initiative process is progressing: “There are people who are writing the initiative as we speak and are making sure everything is done on a timeline,” he said.

Once a measure has its title and summary, it is cleared to begin gathering signatures. Measures are given – at most – 150 days to do this. But the health care plan must gather the necessary 694,354 valid signatures (which takes an estimated 1.2 million actual signatures) in a much shorter time frame.

If, for instance, they submitted the measure today (Dec. 21), the attorney general would have to issue title and summary by Feb. 14., according to the speaker’s office, though Attorney General Jerry Brown could issue it sooner.

If the full time were taken by Brown, it would give the campaign roughly 67 days to collect the 1.2 million signatures, before submitting them to counties by the April 21 deadline recommended by the secretary of state’s office.

Of course, they are not submitting the measure today. So for every day after today that the measure is not submitted, subtract one day from the estimated time allotted to signature-gathering.

Still following?

Such tight timelines have been met before. But it gets tougher and more expensive the smaller the window, says Lee Albright, president of National Petition Management, a signature-gathering firm in California.

“Successful campaigns have been qualified in a 30-day time frame, but that’s outrageously expensive and an incredible gamble,” said Albright.

In 2005, what became Proposition 76, Schwarzenegger’s budget measure, collected nearly 600,000 signatures in about 40 days. The record came in 1998, when Indian tribes gathered more than 430,000 signatures in less time than that – though they spent millions doing it.

Albright, the signature-gatherer, said a campaign 50 days of gathering time would be very possible to make the November ballot.

Any less than that and “you are taking a risk,” he said. “It all depends on what type of funding you have.”

“We haven’t made a final determination on what the timeline is we are looking at,” said Mendelsohn, the Schwarzenegger aide. But, he said, “The timeline is fast approaching.”

All sides have remained optimistic as the clock ticks. The Senate has tentatively set a health committee hearing for Jan. 16 to hear the legislation, before it would move on to the Senate floor.

“It’s never been hard to collect signatures for a tobacco tax,” Trost said.

Posted by Shane Goldmacher on December 21, 2007 2:27 PM