Comprehensive Health Care Coverage

SB 921 (Kuehl), Health Care for All Californians Act

ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND FOR SB 921:

For more than 10 years, the health care advocacy community has supported incremental reform as the method most likely to solve the health care system's inability to provide health insurance to some seven million of the state's residents. (Eighty to eighty-five percent of Californians without health insurance are working adults or their dependents. Immigrants comprise only six percent of the uninsured.) Cost-cutting measures by providers to assure profitability have reduced quality of care, sometimes to tragic proportion. Insurance premium increases now are at double digit levels and are expected to continue at such rates for the next two to three years and beyond. The system is in worse condition than 10 years ago because of excess administrative costs, overpriced pharmaceuticals, use of emergency rooms for non-emergency care and uncontrolled capital costs. And now, the situation is compounded by the state's budget crisis.

The League of Women Voters of California strongly supported SB 480, a bill which after four years came to fruition as California's landmark Health Care Options Project. The HCOP analyzed nine options for expanding health coverage. The findings projected for each option: how many people would be covered, how much each reform would cost, and how each reform could improve the quality of health care. This landmark effort has given the California legislature tools to resolve the current health care crisis.

The 2002 Health Care Options Project analyses of three single payer plans on which SB 921 is based found that they would save billions of dollars annually while still providing comprehensive and high quality health care to all Californian residents. An upcoming report by the respected Lewin Group generally predicts even better figures for SB 921 and will provide guidance for fine-tuning the financing aspects of the health care system called for by the bill.

Private health insurance premiums would be replaced by a low percentage health care tax paid by employers, employees, the self-employed, and recipients of unearned income (much less than most now pay annually as combined expenses for premiums, cost sharing, deductibles, co-payments, and prescription drugs). These taxes would be placed into a State Health Fund along with federal, state, and county monies that are now expended on health care. The fund would reimburse private providers for providing health care services to California residents. This plan would not spend beyond what is currently being spent for health care in California.

The system would be governed by a state elected commissioner of health who would head a state health agency that would consolidate existing health care agencies and would include an office of consumer advocacy, a health policy board, and a board of medical practice standards.