Select Committee Assembly hearings on Senate Bill 562 were a flagrant kabuki theater

Link to original article here. 

I traveled to Sacramento last month for the first hearings by the State Assembly Select Committee on Health Care Delivery Systems and Universal Coverage.

My hope was to witness some positive movement towards passing the Healthy California Act, Senate Bill 562.

I thought I would hear testimonies about the 40 percent of Californians – nearly 15 million people – who are either uninsured or underinsured and desperately need relief from our corporate health care insurance system.

What I saw was nothing more than political “kabuki theater.”

The State Assembly Select Committee on Health Care Delivery Systems and Universal Coverage was supposedly set up to examine the current status of health care delivery and alternative “options” from around the world. Instead, it held sham hearings that prevented constructive dialogue concerning SB562 and promoted frivolous disregard of the public hearings process.

What happened?

Rather than hearing from impacted community members like seniors, people with disabilities, nurses and doctors, and health care activists, the Select Committee chose a line up of presenters mostly stacked with friends of the status quo. Day one’s testimony was dominated by presentations by Insure the Uninsured Project about the corporate health care industry’s “health care landscape.” On day two, The Commonwealth Fund presented some evidence that other industrialized countries fare better than the U.S. with a universal system.

This is telling.

Board members of ITUP include a former Senior VP of Molina Healthcare and a former CEO of L.A. Care Health Plan. The ITUP Advisory Council includes Charles Bacchi, a health insurance industry lobbyist with California Association of Health Plans, Gary Cohen with Blue Shield of California, Susan Fleischman, M.D. with Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc., Anne McLeod with the California Hospital Association, a lobbying group, and Wendy Welsh with Partnership HealthPlan of California.

Speaker Anthony Rendon and Assembly Members Jim Wood and Joaquin Arambula should be ashamed for “stacking the deck” in the Select Committee.

In essence, they compromised the integrity of public hearing process, in favor of lengthy lies and half truths from representatives of a dehumanizing and dysfunctional corporate health care industry.

To be clear, there were community members – doctors and nurses and patients – among the most powerful speakers. They were only given two minutes to tell their stories during the public comment period at the end of the hearings.  They told complicated, distressing and real-life stories about how corporate health care is failing our communities and how the Healthy California Act would help. However, not a single representative from the more than 350 businesses and organizations in the Healthy California Campaign was actually invited to testify. Those include, Business Alliance for a Healthy California, California Partnership, Courage Campaign, ACLU of Southern California, California Alliance of Retired Persons or California Nurses Association, the sponsors of SB 562.

These moves by the Select Committee effectively silenced the voices of the tens of thousands of Californians who rallied and marched last summer to advance SB562.

The corporate health insurance industry is out of touch with reality and too cumbersome and complex. Californians deserve an easy experience that that they can trust. Not like the current system that forces families to lurch from one insurance policy to another with every new job or choose between affordability or  care that could improve or save their lives.

On a positive note, we should remember that California has always gotten it right on progressive issues. Our state continues to set important precedents on controversial legislation and often lends the rest of the nation a blueprint for more just policies and a brighter future.

That requires giving people a voice, not kowtowing to corporate interest.

To the State Assembly members: do not deny Californians a forthright discussion about all of our health care options, including a California Medicare for All system.  Anything less is a callous disregard for the needs of the people you are supposed to work for – the people of California.

George Savage is a retired business owner and a board member of California OneCare.