Rarely do we see political hoopla for a legislative bill that is a long way from becoming law. But on Tuesday, September 12, a mini rally on the Village Green at 4:30 p.m., with music and short speeches, will focus attention on the universal health care insurance bill passed by the state legislature last week but vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger. The rally, including a march along Sunset from 5:15 to 6 p.m., will conclude at the Woman’s Club on Haverford with a screening of ‘The Health Care Solution CaliforniaOne Care,’ which explains the benefits of the system proposed by SB840. ‘This has to be a grassroots effort,’ says Palisadian George Savage, state chairman of the OneCareNow campaign committee. ‘It has to bubble up from down below, or people just glaze over.’ A retired advertising executive and partner at Kalis and Savage, George stumbled onto the 10-year-old organization three years ago. ‘I had not really been an activist,’ Savage says. ‘Eileen and I are both interested in a lot of stuff [wife Eileen is a well-known advocate for Palisades public schools], but when I saw that this health plan provides the most efficient, most effective, real full coverage forever, I thought: Is this real? It has became my mitzvah.’ The OneCareNow campaign of community awareness and education calls for staging ‘activism’ events, one each day, in a different city for 365 days in a row. The first event was in Morro Bay on August 12, and the last will be in Los Angeles on August 12, 2007. The Palisades event is one of 20 city events leading up to next August’s events. On a largely party line 43-30 vote, the Assembly approved Sheila Kuehl’s SB840, which would eliminate private medical insurance plans and establish a statewide health insurance system to provide comprehensive health and dental insurance for all Californians. Sen. Kuehl has been pushing for a one-payer system for a number of years as a response to inadequate and costly health-care insurance in the state. The legislature estimated that 6.5 million Californians lacked health-care coverage at some time in 2004, including one in every five nonelderly Californians. Health-care spending continues to grow much faster than the economy, and efforts to control health-care costs and the growth of health- care spending have been unsuccessful. Consumers can no longer rely on traditional health care coverage owing to a continuous decline of employer-offered coverage, unstable employment trends, and uncontrolled increases in the amount of premiums and cost-sharing, and increases in benefit gaps, legislative analysts argued. Although the state Senate has already approved the plan once and is expected this week to approve changes that the Assembly made to the bill, Schwarzenegger vetoed the bill Tuesday, emphasizing ‘that government should not be getting in there and running a health- care system.’ Savage is realistic about what he calls the obstacles ahead’the insurance and drug companies. But he notes adds that ‘the unions have now decided not to stand in the way of this, and leaders of the Chamber of Commerce in California and large corporations have said we cannot go on with the current situation. It’s economics. It’s money. This is a nonpartisan thing, a common-sense issue.’
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