CA: As State Bill Dies, Activists Turn to Single Payer Bill

Berkeley Daily Planet:

"Advocates of single payer health insurance in California are saying that the collapse of the Nuñez-Perata-Schwarzenegger health care bill is a good thing and are moving forward with reviving their own single-payer legislation.

“We were opposed to the Nuñez bill,” Vote Health representative Kay Eisenhower said by telephone this week. “We considered it a step backwards.” Vote Health is an Alameda County-based health care activist organization.

Eisenhower said statewide single-payer health care advocates will be holding a two-day conference in Los Angeles later this month to talk about ways to put State Senator Sheila Kuehl’s (D-Santa Monica-Los Angeles) SB 840 single-payer health care bill back on track. “SB 840’s not dead,” she said. “It’s only on ice.”

Two years ago, it seemed dead. After SB 840 passed the state legislature in 2006, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed it.

Kuehl revived her single payer bill a year later, and the bill passed the Senate on a 23-15 vote and the Assembly Health Committee on a 12-5 vote last summer, but it stalled in the Assembly Appropriations Committee as attention in the Assembly turned to a compromise bill being put together by Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez.

The bill’s summary says it “would establish the California Universal Healthcare System (CUHS) under which all California residents would be eligible for specified health care benefits. The CUHS would, on a single-payer basis, negotiate for or set fees for health care services provided through the system, and pay claims for those services.”"

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