I keep the entire archive of this weblog available online and I hope some of you admire my courage in doing this. It means that all my predictions which don't come true are still there, smirking at me. If you look back, you'll find me fearlessly decreeing — among other bad calls — that Arnold Schwarzenegger wouldn't run for governor of California and that Ellen DeGeneres won't be asked to host the Oscars. But hey, I'm still right more often than a lot of public officials. (Then again, so is Captain Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz…)
Back there also somewhere, you might find me thinking that Schwarzenegger would be a pretty bad governor…and for the first year or so of his term, I was right. He was terrible, his poll numbers were worse than the reviews for Jingle All the Way, and even a lot of his prominent supporters were talking about another recall election. At some point though, he seems to have wised up and managed to turn things around. He won another term partly because his opponent was a lox but also because even his one-time detractors suddenly didn't have a lot of beefs with Governor Arnold.
Some of us may be taking the last bit of our negative feelings back if he comes through with his newest proposal. It's Universal Health Care, which is an idea whose time I think came in this country a long time ago. People are dying every day from the high cost of medical treatment in this country. Even people who are covered are paying too high a price, financially and from the inefficiency of the system. There are a lot of lethal things in this world we can't do anything about but we can sure fix the clogged emergency rooms, the sky-high costs of prescriptions, the unavailability of certain equipment, the spread of some diseases, etc. Just worrying about getting and keeping health insurance is taking a lot of years off some lives.
Schwarzenegger is about to announce a plan that will guarantee health care for all children in the state of California. As this article explains, some of the details are still unknown and for all we know, the program may have problems or may not pass. Still, that a governor of a highly-populated state — and a Republican governor, in particular — could get behind such a thing is another of those small steps for man, giant leaps for mankind that you occasionally hear about. It's going to make it that much harder for the idea of U.H.C. to be dismissed by a certain crowd…you know, the ones who think the only thing the government can do with great efficiency is invade other countries.
And isn't it going to be an interesting press conference? Arnold — one of the relatively small group of Californians who can afford first-rate medical care — sitting there with his broken leg, announcing that even the children of illegal aliens are going to be able to get treatment for things like broken legs? I sure hope he throws in one of those movie line quotes like "I'll be back" or a Terminator joke because if he pulls this off, that may be the only thing some of us will have to complain about.