The 49th Parallel Moves South
California votes to adopt a

Canadian-style healthcare plan

by Scott C. Tips

Editor of Health Freedom News
Board Member and Legal Counsel for NHF

December 2005

Some people are thrilled to tears. California will very soon have its own version of the Canadian healthcare system—complete with a coercive government monopoly on healthcare insurance and treatment, prison terms and fines for anyone who violates that monopoly, and massive electronic database files on every enrolled patient’s most intimate medical details. Soon enough, there will also be long lines of people waiting to be treated and a general scarcity of healthcare services. And there will be a politically powerful “health czar,” serving for at least eight years, ruling over it all. It’s time to celebrate, or to dry those tears and run for the exits—depending upon whether you like to be told what to do or prefer to think and act on your own.

Sprung from the loins of the California Democratic Party, Senate Bill 840 has been glowingly named the “California Health Insurance Reliability Act” or CHIRA. And this bill has already passed the California Senate by a vote of 25 to 15. It will soon be voted upon by the California Assembly and, unless voted down there or vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger, could become law by the time you read this.

If there is one issue that darkens the horizon of American healthcare more than any other, it is actually this one. As important as they are, neither Codex Alimentarius nor the anti-DSHEA bills are as immediately dangerous as this latest advance in nationalizing insurance healthcare. The California political establishment’s desire to bungee jump the California people into the arms of a government healthcare system will also support the continued absorption and bastardization of complementary and alternative medicine and the suppression of true, alternative holistic practices.

Setting the Trend

With its large, polyglot population spending over $200 billion annually on healthcare, its numerous and wealthy businesses, its powerful politicians, and—even more—its powerful television and film moguls, California wields a political and cultural influence as a trendsetter for the nation far beyond even its numbers. That is why what California adopts as its healthcare system portends much for the rest of the country.

Investigative journalist Peter Barry Chowka, in his excellent article “Medicine, Inc. Moves To Restrict Privacy and Health Care Options As A Mandatory, Single Payer, Universal Health Care Plan Nears Passage in California,” (Would you believe that the title is the article?) agrees. Giving a broad overview of the medical industry, his article skillfully examines and vivisects this disaster in the making. In his view, a rapidly expanding medical-industrial complex in the United States is assuming total control over every healing method  and,   hence,   over   every   person.     (See  http://members.aol.com/

pbchowka/socialized_med10012005.html)  After the defeat of the Clinton healthcare plan in 1993, California SB 840 is the latest vehicle for re-launching and accomplishing this task.

What's Wrong With SB 840

Ostensibly, SB 840 wants to end the chaos of private healthcare insurance, increase its availability, and reduce healthcare costs in California. Although I would dispute that there is chaos in private healthcare insurance, we must all admit that it is not as available or as affordable as it should be. Proponents of single-payer, government-mandated healthcare say that the solution is for the government to entrench itself even more firmly and deeply into the healthcare system. Others, me included, contend that more of the same medicine that caused the problem in the first place will never be the cure.

Basically, the bill will outlaw private healthcare insurance in California and require that all private and public plans fold into the—let’s face it—huge bureaucracy that it will create within two years of its passage. The bureaucracy, named the California Health Insurance System (CHIS), will be the 500-pound gorilla in the medical industry and even though private practitioners will still be allowed to stand clear of the system, if they so choose, doing that will be exceedingly difficult as time passes and virtually all of the population and service providers will be roped into the government healthcare system of services and payments.

Fees and prices will be determined by the CHIS and no healthcare providers may deviate from those set fees without facing fines and even imprisonment. There will be multiple boards that will make decisions about healthcare matters, and all of this will be funded with a new tax to be levied upon Californians.

All California residents will be eligible for coverage. This includes illegal aliens since “residency shall be based upon physical presence in the state with the intent to reside.” (Health & Safety Code §140400) This broad definition alone is guaranteed to bust the budget of this not-yet-formed bureaucracy, but there are enough other reasons for it to very quickly outrun any cost projections made for it.

The bill creates a commissioner position to oversee all of this. The commissioner shall be elected for a term of eight years; and, with a nod to the reality of political economics, the bill also prohibits all sorts of political activity so as to avoid conflicts of interest and influence peddling. As they always do, these prohibitions will inevitably be nothing more than road bumps to graft and corruption. And the influence peddlers with the deepest pockets will certainly not be the holistic practitioners and whole-food companies, so expect bureaucratic antagonism to any alternative health practices that might deviate from orthodoxy or exist outside the system.

Politics Over Economics

Starry-eyed dreamers commendably wish that everyone would enjoy quality medical care. I agree with those dreamers. Where we differ is that they think that their goal can be accomplished by a show of hands in a democracy with a hopefully benevolent government ordering that quality healthcare be given to everyone. It is politics over economics, and these dreamers forget that the government cannot give even one thin dime to anyone without having first taken it from someone else. Governments don’t create; they take and redistribute. And they do that based not upon sound economics but, as Benjamin Franklin once said, upon—in a democracy at least—“two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.”

CHIS bureaucrats cannot possibly keep up with the needs of millions of people. They are literally incapable of doing so. In the same way that the Codex Alimentarius Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements are doomed to abysmal failure as a method of ensuring food safety with their “set-in-stone” standards, CHIS healthcare policy will always be retrograde, inefficient, and anti-health. Anyone who distrusts the Codex process cannot support this same form of elitist, top-down control of healthcare that will soon be imposed upon California by SB 840.

But the bill itself reveals the nitty-gritty side of politics. Even the starry-eyed dreamers cannot give everyone quality medical care with this proposed law, as shown by its provisions. Just consider §140201(b), which reads “premiums collected each year shall be roughly sufficient to cover that year’s projected costs.” (emphasis added) That language is a silver-edged engraved invitation to all politicians everywhere to far exceed budgets.

And the politicians know it too, because other language in the bill provides for benefit-cutting measures: “Cost control measures include any or all of the following: . . . (3) Postponement of introduction of new benefits or benefit improvements, (4) Temporary decrease in benefits, (5) Postponement of planned capital expenditures, . . . (11) Imposition of co-payments or deductible payments, (12) Imposition of eligibility waiting period and other means.” (§140203(c)) Just AS in Canada, the health bureaucrats will control costs by rationing services. This means long lines and waiting periods for necessary medical services, resulting in the needless deaths of many. The Fraser Institute reports that of more than 31 million Canadians, some 876,584 were waiting for treatment of all types at the time surveyed. At least in Canada, Canadians can head south of the border for basic healthcare and high-tech treatment unavailable there. Perhaps Californians will flee eastward or to Mexico when they face the same problem.

Interestingly enough, the Revenues section of the bill (§140230) has been left blank—“Reserved” the politicians call it! I guess that can be conveniently filled in after the bill is passed and signed into law. And the real winner is that the CHIS shall be “exempt from the regulatory oversight and review procedures empowered to the Office of Administrative Law.” (§140307) Combine this exemption with the massive databases on private persons that the CHIS will create and have ready access to, and you have a recipe for privacy intrusion on a massive scale.

There Is No Simple Solution

We all would like to think that there is a simple solution to the healthcare mess. Many think it would be wonderful if the government—increasingly seen by many as the secular form of god on earth—would wave a wand and miraculously solve this and all other problems. Unfortunately, that is exactly what the government has been trying to do since it first stepped into the healthcare business decades ago. It has only made matters worse.

If you realize nothing else, realize that government’s first involvement with Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s created market distortions of supply and demand that later led to further calls for government “help” and increasingly deeper intervention into the medical marketplace to correct those initial distortions. These widening distortions—combined with monopolistic occupational licensing laws that have restricted entry into healthcare jobs, raised prices, and stifled innovation—are responsible for the incredible healthcare problems we face today.

In “Health-Care Socialism” (June 2003 issue of Freedom Daily), Scott McPherson asks “So the only question is, what system has shown itself capable of best distributing the greatest amount of any good or service to the greatest number of people, at the highest quality and lowest price? The answer is the free market. Medical care is no different from any other commodity. In order to be most efficiently and widely distributed, it requires the unfettered signals of supply and demand, lest it fall victim to socialism’s standard shortcomings: bureaucratization, rationing, rising costs, overproduction (in some areas), underproduction (in others), and eventual failure.”

Probably none of us alive today has ever experienced a genuine free market in healthcare. Despite what many believe, it has actually been a long time since there was a free market in healthcare in the United States. The solution to our problems here is not to keep making the same mistake of getting the government more and more involved in private economic matters.

In the end, the nationalization of healthcare insurance in California will not provide the universal quality healthcare that its proponents want. It will instead obey the law of unintended consequences and give us the exact opposite—freezing out innovative holistic practices, reducing quality and availability of care, institutionalizing failure, and inevitably requiring even more government intervention to “correct” the even worse problems that will result. Our children will grow up in the mistaken belief that only government can provide healthcare, not knowing that there are true alternatives to settling for third-rate care.