Governor Schwarzenegger Vetoes Both Workers' Comp Bill and Universal Health Care Bill
The legislation would have doubled benefits for newly disabled workers and would have set up a universal health care system covering all Californians, respectively.
Associated Press
Wednesday, September 20, 2006
Workers' compensation bill vetoed
The measure would have restored some benefits taken away in a 2004 overhaul.
SACRAMENTO - Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed legislation Tuesday that would have doubled benefits for newly disabled workers, contending the bill would have undercut "many of the economic gains now powering California's economy."
But the measure's supporters said it would have eased one of the worst aspects of the workers' compensation overhaul pushed through by the Republican governor in 2004.
"Governor Schwarzenegger said himself that he didn't want injured workers to suffer from benefit cuts," said Art Pulaski, executive secretary-treasurer of the California Labor Federation. "It's a shame he refused to rectify the damage he caused."
The bill, by Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata, D-Oakland, was a reaction to regulations adopted by the Schwarzenegger administration late in 2004 to help implement a broad workers' compensation overhaul approved by lawmakers earlier that year.
The regulations changed the way doctors evaluate the severity of job-related injuries and, critics said, led to a sharp drop in benefits for workers with permanent disabilities.
The state Commission on Health and Safety and Workers' Compensation, made up of employer and worker representatives, issued a report in February that said the average benefit was cut 50 percent because of the regulations.
Perata's bill would have gradually doubled the number of weeks workers could have received benefits as compensation for permanent disabilities suffered starting Jan. 1.
The governor said Perata's bill was based on incomplete evidence and that he would consider changes in the regulations if his own review found workers were being unfairly denied benefits.
"When the new permanent disability schedule took effect in 2005, I committed that we would monitor the impact of the new law on injured workers for 18 months and if we found that seriously injured workers were falling through the cracks we would fix it," Schwarzenegger said in his veto message. "That review will be completed by the end of the year, and I am committed to making any changes necessary to ensure that injured workers unfairly impacted by workers' comp reform received appropriate medical treatment and indemnity benefits."
Associated Press
September 22, 2006
By By Steve Lawrence
Schwarzenegger vetoes universal health care bill
SACRAMENTO - Saying he opposes government-run health care, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger followed through Friday on his promise to veto a Democratic bill that would have set up a universal health care system covering all Californians.
"Socialized medicine is not the solution to our state's health care problems," the Republican governor said in an unusually long veto message in which also he touted his efforts to expand two other government health care programs, Medi-Cal and Healthy Families, which serve the poor.
"This bill would require an extraordinary redirection of public and private funding by creating a vast new bureaucracy to take over health insurance and medical care for Californians - a serious and expensive mistake."
He said he wanted to see a "new paradigm that addresses affordability, shared responsibility and the promotion of healthy living. Single payer, government-run health care does none of this."
But the bill's author, Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, said Schwarzenegger mischaracterized the bill's effects. She said it would do what the governor said he wanted while saving health care consumers and doctors money.
"Where there are no cost controls at all now, and enormous administrative overhead and profit for insurance companies, there would have been a transparent system that actually would succeed in making health care affordable in California," she said in a statement.
Kuehl suggested Schwarzenegger's real agenda was to "leave health care in the hands of private insurance companies and let working families lose coverage one family at a time."
The bill would have provided every California resident with health insurance through a program administered by a new entity, the California Health Insurance Agency, that would have been headed by a commissioner appointed by the governor.
The system would have been partially financed by the state's current spending on health care and partly by consumers and their employers in place of private insurance payments.
A state commission would have made recommendations to the governor and Legislature about how much to charge patients and businesses in premiums.
Supporters said it would save money by significantly reducing administrative costs, pointing to the 2 percent spent on administration by Medicare, the federal health care program for senior citizens, as an example.
A program like the one proposed by Kuehl would save nearly $8 billion in the first year, according to an analysis by the independent Lewin Group commissioned by the bill's supporters.
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