California Insider

Gov. Schwarzenegger named his health services director and public health officer today.

Heading Health Services will be Sandra Shewry, who has been director of the health division of the National Governor’s Association Center for Best Practices. She is also the former executive director of the California Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board and was the assistant secretary of the California Health and Welfare Agency.

The Public Health Officer will be Dr. Richard Jackson, senior adviser to the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He was previously director of the National Center for Environmental Health and was an epidemiologist with the World Health Organization.

Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg and allies backing a ballot measure that would raise taxes on million-dollar earners to pay for expanded mental health care say they have collected nearly twice as many signatures as they need to qualify the initiative for the November ballot.

The campaign for Mental Health plans a press conference at the Capitol tomorrow to make the official announcement. If approved, the measure would raise an estimated $600 million in its first full year, with most of that distributed to counties to expand mental health services. The money would come from a 1 percent surcharge on earnings over $1 million, with that surcharge applied on top of whatever tax rate is applied through the normal tax system. In other words, it would be separate and in addition to any tax increase levied on the wealthy to help balance the budget. The mental health tax would effectively increase taxes by about 10 percent on about 25,000 taxpayers at the top of California's income heap.

The RAND Institute has a new policy brief out on the possibility of regulating health insurance premiums, and the report’s conclusions seem to depend on the eye of the beholder. The California HealthCare Foundation, which commissioned the report, says rate regulation is likely to produce unintended consequences, including scrimping on care and a lack of investment in new technologies. That's definitely the major conclusion of the report. But the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, which is sponsoring a bill to impose regulation, notes that the study also concludes that regulation, at least in the short term, could hold down rates. And FTCR says regulation would work even better with limits on hospital and pharmaceutical profits. Here is a link to the HealthCare Foundation and the RAND study. And here is the FTCR rebuttal.