Premature Health Initiative

A hastily enacted bill to force employers to provide health insurance for many of the state’s uninsured workers was a product of frantic times in pre-recall Sacramento. Its lack of cost controls delighted the health-care industry, just as the absence of financial incentives frustrated employers who will be forced to foot 80% of costs. None of that mattered at the time to a vote-hungry Gov. Gray Davis, who pushed to sign SB 2 amid a flurry of ill-advised legislation in the days leading up to the recall vote.

The California Chamber of Commerce now claims to have gathered enough signatures to put an initiative on the March state ballot that would stop SB 2. Even though backers have a $15-million war chest, it will be a tough campaign. These days, even widows on fixed incomes are mad enough about spiraling health-care costs to honor picket lines thrown up by grocery employees defending their own medical benefits.

SB 2 is a well-intentioned but sorely deficient answer to the plight of 6.3 million uninsured Californians. Rather than racing to get the measure on the ballot for reconsideration -- which, suddenly, seems to be the first rather than the last recourse in California -- the state Chamber of Commerce should have lobbied legislators for a few years’ delay in its implementation. Delay, still a possibility, would give the state economy time to rebound and allow employers to again hire in earnest. As it stands, most employers will pay SB 2’s costs by laying off existing employees or not hiring new workers.

A delay also would give Sacramento time to do what it should have done earlier this year -- deal with the glaring absence of price and utilization controls, an absence that led to the meltdown of the state’s workers’ compensation system. Sacramento should study other substantive ideas too, such as Blue Shield of California’s “universal coverage, universal responsibility” proposal, which would more fairly divide the cost of insurance among consumers, business and government, as well as provide cost and utilization controls.

The chamber’s rush to a ballot initiative in March might make the discussion moot, and now it appears that only court action can block a public vote. Delaying implementation of SB 2 in the Legislature would be a much easier and less divisive route than a costly initiative battle.

It would still take guts, a quality Davis lacked when he opted not to veto SB 2 and one that is still in short supply among legislators nervously eyeing elections. But the Senate and Assembly’s quick work to rescind the controversial and sloppily worded bill that allowed illegal immigrants to drive legally suggests that ‘tis the season for second thoughts. SB 2 should be next in line.