Cough and Scoot for State Doctors?

Today’s editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Say no, governor: Democrats seek state takeover of health care,” succinctly sums up the incredible inanity of California’s liberal Democrat legislature.

It's hard to imagine anything worse than giving control of health care to the same folks who brought California the power crisis, budget deficits, crumbling freeways and struggling schools. But that's precisely what Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, has in mind….
Setting aside political tactics, there remains this dreadful bill. SB 840 would do away with private health insurers. Instead, a state agency would pay doctors and hospitals, in part with cash from existing health subsidies for the poor. The rest of the money would come from a new payroll tax.
New taxes require a two-thirds majority in the Legislature. Kuehl knows she can't muster the votes. So her bill would create a state bureaucracy to sit around until some future Legislature raised taxes for government-only health insurance. Without a trace of irony, Kuehl claims her new bureaucracy would operate with lower overhead costs than the private insurers it replaced.
Certainly, expanding coverage to the state's 6 million uninsured is a noble goal. But a government takeover is precisely the wrong way to help more people. European government systems are plagued with poor quality, long waits and other forms of rationing.
The proper role of government is to get out of the way as private industry attacks the core problems of our health system. Given the right tools, doctors and patients will fix health care. Medicine is far too important to be left to unimpressive legislators in Sacramento.

Ed Morrissey weighs in, with customary common-sense:

Previous California legislation on workers-comp protection and workplace regulation helped start an exodus of corporate headquarters for better business environments. Creating a whole new bureaucracy for health management and putting rationing decisions in the hands of bureaucrats may start a new exodus of healthy people looking for less-intrusive and less-costly tax regimes. Despite the long wait times for anything but primary care issues in single-payer nations such as Canada and the UK -- the latter of which has to destroy organs for lack of doctors to transplant them -- California wants to add to its already top-heavy bureaucracies and add more budget-busting entitlements to a budget that resembles science fiction.
Hillary Clinton tried to foist the same system onto the entire country, and the nation reacted by ending forty years of Democratic domination in the House. Perhaps the same result could come from this irresponsible social engineering project. When people start to understand that they just created a DMV for health care, California voters may just revolt against the entrenched Democratic power structure. Even the Democratic nominee for goverrnor won't endorse the Kuehl bill. Phil Angelides wanted to push more health-care mandates onto the private sector instead, a bad idea but nowhere near as disastrous as this.
In a move typical of the myopic state legislature, the bill doesn't even address the costs that the new bureaucracy will create. The Assembly noted that it will take several years to implement the mandate -- which means that they're going to pass the buck to another group of legislators. Term limits keeps Assembly members from serving more than six years, which means damned few of the culprits will be around to account for the massive bill that will come. However, they have considered revenue streams for the new regime -- an additional 8 percent on the payroll tax that businesses pay and a 3 point hike on the state income tax. That will come before the sunset of the health-care plans that businesses and their employees buy, creating an overlap of costs -- and that assumes that the revenue stream will be enough to pay for the massive spending necessary for the state-run system.

People around the country may shrug this off, figuring that it's just California. However, don't be surprised to see utopians in your neighborhood heralding the coming Brave New World in the Golden State and agitating for the same system where you live.

I weighed in a few days ago, with “Will California Dictate Your Health Care?” An in-depth study of the cruel joke of the Kuehl bill is included.