No amount of muscle — political or otherwise — was able to bring about passage of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s health reform plan, which California’s Senate Health Committee rejected Monday in a 7-1 vote. The bill, which had made it through the state’s Assembly late last year, couldn’t get past the jittery Senate committee worried that the ambitious $15 billion proposal was too expensive to enact during a time of fiscal crisis.
The state, hit hard by the housing slump, is facing deficits nearly as large as the bill’s cost, forcing Schwarzenegger to call for closures of state parks and early release of prison inmates, among other cost-cutting measures.
California’s plan would have combined Massachusetts-like mandates requiring uninsured individuals to get coverage with requirements for businesses to spend a certain percentage on their employees’ health care, or to pay into a state program. It proposed a cigarette tax hike to pay for the plan and had been expected to pass the Democratic-controlled legislature before bad economic news made lawmakers reconsider.
Many health reform advocates felt the passage of the bill in the country’s most populous state would have made reform easier on a national scale. But others felt the math never added up and that the program would be underfunded from the start. Whatever the case, the deal is dead, and The Wall Street Journal says it won’t be revived this year, though Schwarzenegger, to paraphrase, vows he’ll “be back” to the health care debate.
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