May 16, 2007

California Dems Seek to Seize $5 Billion in a Huge Step Towards Socialized Medicine

From the LA Times:

Democrats prescribe bigger health levy

SACRAMENTO - Escalating the already tense fight about what financial burden businesses should bear, the Democrats who control the Legislature proposed Tuesday that most California employers be required to spend the equivalent of at least 7.5% of their payrolls on healthcare - nearly twice the amount Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed.

The mandate on employers would raise more than $5 billion and - along with federal taxpayer money and worker contributions - allow California to extend insurance to about 69% of the 4.9 million people who lack it at any given moment. Among states, only Hawaii has a significant employer mandate. But the Democratic proposals in California would go further by including dependent coverage and more part-time workers.

That's the government seeking to grab 7.5% of each company's payroll - a huge amount of money - and force those companies to spend it on healthcare for people who haven't taken responsibility for their own healthcare. That's socialism, and the massive error of it is that it puts decision-making in in the hands of state bureaucracies:

Like the governor's plan, the two Democratic proposals require businesses to spend a set amount of their payroll on healthcare or pay into a state-run fund that would negotiate insurance for workers.

The state is not a skilled negotiator of lower prices. The state is inept at using negotiating power to achieve better service, and generally achieves worse service. If they want to run an optional program, fine, but to seize, by force of law, 7.5% of every business' payroll, is socialistic.

When the government uses the taxation power of the state to target specific kinds of tax-payers to seize money for specific purposes -- purposes which are opposed by those very taxpayers -- that is confiscatory, violent, and socialistic.

We fought a revolution on the principal of "no taxation without representation." If the businesses being taxed oppose the tax, in what sense are they being represented by the government that is seeking to tax them?

Jot Condie, president of the California Restaurant Assn., called the Democrats' mandate "devastating"...

This current socialized medicine proposal is happening because Schwarzennegger started the ball rolling on it:

The Democratic proposals further heightened opposition from much of the state's business lobby, which already has come out against Schwarzenegger's proposal for employers to spend at least 4% of their payroll on healthcare.

Schwarzennegger's 2005 ballot initiatives were brilliant. But four of them were too much for the public to absorb at one time. If he'd just put forward one or two of them, they might have passed. But when none of them passed, Schwarzennegger appears to have decided that he'd rather attempt to be a successful Liberal than risk being a failed Conservative. He appears to have abandoned his principals.

The Republicans in the California congress are doing the right thing:

Republicans have shown no sign of supporting changes of the scope Schwarzenegger and the Democrats want. If anything, their public rhetoric has become less amenable: Dick Ackerman of Irvine, the Senate GOP leader, issued a statement last week that called the proposals a "dangerous experiment with the healthcare system for more than 30 million Californians and the state's competitive and job-creating economy."

This example of the state trying to coercively seize money from businesses is an example of how redistricting thwarts democracy. From a Jill Stewart article quoted in this previous post from 2005:

Most voters think that when they vote, they do so within a community of interest, based largely on geography, known as a voting district. How quaint. That was true once. But now, the California legislature uses computer programs to painstakingly divide voters, block by block. They no longer divide us based on communities of interest, but based on party registration.

Republicans and Democrats are carefully separated from one another and stuck in bizarrely shaped voting districts controlled by just one party. During the spring primary, the party that controls the rigged district carefully spoon-feeds its corralled voters a pre-selected candidate awash in campaign funds. Usually this well-funded party hack beats any normal person who hoped to represent that party come November.

Then, in the November election, because the fake and often strangely shaped voting district is stacked, the party hack who won the spring primary can't lose. Voters are spoon-fed a hack, and with rare exception, it's mathematically impossible for the hack to lose.

Think of The Matrix. You are being spoon-fed in order to support a creepy apparatus that wants to control your world. You don't even know it.

The result? Safe seats, that never change from one party to another:

Safe seats stole away our democracy in California while we slept. Safe seats, are why none of California's 53 Congressional seats changed party hands last Nov. 2, and why none of 100 legislative seats changed party hands. Safe seats are why these freeze-frame outcomes were predicted months before the actual elections.

This literal dividing of Americans by party has no doubt contributed to today's current politically divisive culture.