After months of exhausting irresolution, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez crafted the Schwarzenegger/Nuñez health-care bill, ABX1 1, which sounds like it requires batteries and a remote control. As it turns out, ABX1 1 requires $14 billion that California doesn’t have. 

A wonderful, awful idea.
    In a display of insatiable government spending during the giving season, the California Assembly has passed this bill despite an equally large $14 billion deficit.  Although well-intentioned, this proposal for the Golden State’s uninsured is not well-timed, and not well-planned.  Many of our legislators need to learn that spending and giving are not necessarily equivalent.  Instead, California should give citizens the gift of choice, savings, and health care freedom.

Then he slithered and slunk, with a smile most unpleasant, around the whole room, and he took every present!
    Though supposedly insuring more Californians, ABX1 1 takes many things in return.  It takes away the choice to become insured by mandating that almost all Californians obtain private medical insurance; it takes extra fees from employers to pay for medical insurance; and it takes away the practice of measuring health risk from insurers by mandating guaranteed issue.  It takes an estimated $2.3 billion from hospitals, which is only “supported” by The California Hospital Association (CHA) because it stipulates that hospital taxes must first go to increase Medi-Cal (Medicaid) payments to hospitals before helping California’s uninsured.

What a great Grinchy trick!
    Though Governor Schwarzenegger has given up his plan to lease the lottery to fund health care, he has agreed with Assembly Speaker Nuñez to hike tobacco taxes, estimated at $1.50 to $2 per cigarette pack.

For more, please go to the following link at Pacific Research: 

http://liberty.pacificresearch.org/publications/id.3550/pub_detail.asp