|
Legislation would have provided
affordable plans for all Californians from birth to age 21
Oakland Tribune
October 9, 2005
By Josh Richman
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger late Friday night
vetoed a pair of bills that sought to extend health care insurance
to all California children.
The bills, co-authored by Assembly Health
Committee Chairwoman Wilma Chan, D-Oakland, would have expanded
on the state's MediCal and Healthy Families programs to ensure
every Californian has access to affordable health insurance
from birth to age 21. About 800,000 California children nowlack
health insurance. A state Senate Appropriations Committee
analysis had found Chan's plan would cost about $300 million
in 2006-07 and $500 million in 2007-08.
"I believe that children should be insured
but this bill fails to address a critical question: How to
pay for it?" Schwarzenegger wrote in his veto message.
"This bill would cost the state almost a half billion
dollars a year without providing a funding source at a time
when California has a $7.5 billion structural deficit."
He also faulted the bills for relying solely
on state-program expansion as a means of ensuring coverage
for children. "The measure includes strategies that need
to be further analyzed for their relative effect on enrollment,
cost effectiveness, and program integrity, and evaluated to
ensure that they won't divert resources to administrative
processes and investments for already enrolled children,"
he wrote.
Chan said Saturday "The big losers are
the kids and their families." Chan in the past has said
there would be federal matching funds for every state dollar
spent. And one of the two bills would have created a California
Healthy Kids Fund to collect private contributions as well
as public money to launch the program; many in the business
and philanthropic communities already have signaled they'll
ante up, Chan said.
Chan said Saturday she and other lawmakers
were ready to discuss with Schwarzenegger how to fund the
program in later years.
"Although we've had some dialogue with
(state Health and Human Services Secretary) Kim Belshe and
others in his health department, we never received any substantive
criticism of the bill," she said. "The bill's been
in print for eight months, they've had plenty of time to
give us feedback and ask us to make changes."
And if Schwarzenegger doesn't believe in
mandatory employer-paid health care--signaled by his opposition
to Proposition 72 of 2004--and doesn't want to accomplish
better coverage by expanding existing government programs,
"I'm not sure, if we eliminate those two options, how
we're going to get there," Chan said.
The bill's advocates had noted children with
adequate health care miss less school, furthering the state's
education goals. And perhaps most importantly insuring children
is cheaper than letting families use emergency rooms as primary
care sources.
Parents, children, health care advocates
and Chan will rally outside Oakland's Csar Chvez Elementary
School at 10 a.m. Monday to decry the veto.
|
