Issue Position: Health Care

Issue Position

We must be healthy.

I believe that our current health care system is in a death spiral and it is headed for a complete breakdown. Instead of bringing health care services to more people, we are pricing more people out. The health care system and the current health insurance system is inefficient and in many ways ineffective. All of us are one job, one illness away from not having health care insurance. California is home to six million people without health insurance and residents are more likely to be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions and denied coverage at work than most states in the nation.

As Lt. Governor, I remain actively involved in the effort to enact a universal healthcare system in California. I have offered advice and support to legislators, labor and business leaders and others working to find solutions to California's most critical problem. I have given speeches across the state, encouraging our state's leaders to enact comprehensive reforms and not just focus on what is expedient. I have participated in forums, on panels and given speeches to many organizations from business to labor to healthcare groups, talking about the urgent need to reform our health-care system before any more of us are priced out by the system. I work toward every Californian having universal access to affordable health care. Our health care system should value people before profit.

I have spent more than 30 years working on issues related to healthcare. From the time I graduated UC Berkeley, when my wife Patti and I signed-up for the Peace Corps and served in Ethiopia, where we helped build clinics and eradicate smallpox, to my days as a state legislator, where I chaired the Senate Health Committee and authored the Rural Health Act and wrote the laws that created nurse practitioners and California's Emergency Medical Systems act, healthcare has been my passion, it remains so today. In December 2007, Patti and I were honored to travel to Honduras to continue our lifetime humanitarian work, to commemorate the opening of a community hospital that will serve tens of thousands of people.

High quality affordable healthcare is the right of every Californian. During my first term as California's Insurance Commissioner, I developed a plan for universal healthcare delivered in a system of managed competition. My plan relied on the government serving as a "single-collector," and preserved a patient's choice of doctor and hospital. The plan was adopted by the California Legislature, but did not become law. Newspapers across the nation heralded the plan and it served as a basis for national healthcare reform efforts during the first Clinton Administration.

In 2005, I issued a landmark report entitled: "Priced Out: Healthcare in California," a comprehensive review of California's publicly and privately financed health care delivery systems. It provided a snapshot of the various pressures on the healthcare system and analyzed the many factors driving the cost of healthcare. The report emphasized mechanisms to control the unsustainable escalation in costs and included 45 specific recommendations for reforming the healthcare system. Priced Out acknowledged that the ultimate solution to the healthcare crisis was a universal healthcare system, but focused on systemic changes that could be pursued immediately.

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