Governor Schwarzenegger has vetoed the bill that would have established Universal Health Care in California. Here's the statement he issued explaining why. There may be some argument for his position with regard to the dollar costs — I don't have enough info to calculate that, nor do I have the math skills. But I wonder if anyone at this stage has enough information to evaluate the price tag…or even if it could possibly be worse than what we have now in this country. Where I become suspicious of the reasons for the veto is when he says…
I want to see a new paradigm that addresses affordability, shared responsibility and the promotion of healthy living. Single payer, government-run health care does none of this. Yet it would reduce a person's ability to choose his or her own physician, make people wait longer for treatment and raise the cost of that treatment.
Every time someone in this country opposes any sort of government-controlled health program, they trot out the claims that it would strip people of the right to choose their own doctors and force them to submit to the poking, probing and prescriptions of doctors selected by the government. That was said by those who opposed the national plan proposed by Hillary Clinton in 1993 and it was an outright lie, as anyone who read the plan could clearly see. The bill Schwarzenegger is vetoing is pretty explicit in saying you could choose your own physician. You can see the text of it here.
There's a bit of double-talk in a claim that under a government-run health program you'd be limited in picking your own doctor. Under a system of total free enterprise, you're limited in picking your own doctor, too. In fact, if you can't afford decent medical care, you're very limited. I suppose someone will point out that very rich people — like, say, multi-millionaire actors — can pretty much get the doctor of their choice…but your average Californian cannot. A pretty horrifying percentage of them, when they get sick or injured, have to just go to some hospital's emergency room and wait for hours upon hours to see whoever's on duty and receive a little assembly-line care. A half-dozen times the last year (once for myself, the other times for someone else), I've had to be in those emergency rooms. Anyone who'll tell you the current system isn't broken obviously has not.
As for the claims that the bill he's vetoing would "make people wait longer for treatment and raise the cost of that treatment," I'm also skeptical. I'd love to hear the explanation of why those things would occur. I suspect there isn't one, other than some general distrust of government involvement.
I believe we will soon see the kind of government-run single-payer Universal Health System that Schwarzenegger is nixing and that Republicans have long opposed. We'll see it established in some states, work in those states and then become national. Businesses increasingly want it so they can get the responsibility of employee insurance off their backs. The medical community seems to want it because they see how the present system is not working. Your average citizen/voter either wants it or would if people weren't scaring them with claims that they'll have to go to a doctor they don't like and even then, they'll have to wait months to have that broken leg or bleeding treated.
It'll happen. It's just that a lot of people are going to die or at least suffer from the current, inefficient system before that happens.