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: : Issues Overview
Thank you for visiting my issues page. As I travel, listen, and discuss the issues of the 15th Assembly District during the course
of this campaign, I expect to hear numerous ideas and solutions to the problems we all face. Because the fact is, no one person has
all the answers. If you have an idea to help our state move forward, I want to hear them. In the coming months I will be adding
new ideas, yours and mine, to this page. Please take a few minutes and send me an email,
or call me and let me know what we could do better. I look forward to hearing from you.
HEALTHCARE
Health insurance is simple - but not in the United States. California alone has 300 different health coverage providers. This highly inefficient hodgepodge costs us billions annually in expenses devoted to duplication and shareholder return rather than quality healthcare. We can talk at length about the statistical side of this great problem but in reality, it's the real faces of the un-insured that pulls at the heartstrings and drives the strongest argument and I see those faces.
 It's the family of seven, two couples, kids and grandpa living under one roof, all hard working and playing by the rules yet only one member of the household has medical coverage and that comes through Medi-Cal. It's the self-employed video producer who pays ever increasing high premiums but ends up paying 10,000 dollars out-of-pocket in co-pays and deductibles for outpatient knee surgery. His $300 per month plan only covered hospitalization. He is still being hounded by collection agencies and wonders why he bothered to get health insurance at all.
And then there is the self-employed carpenter who fractured his rib in a motorcycle accident on his way to a job and was taken to a trauma center outside of his hometown care area and was stuck with a 12,000 dollar bill. "I'm not a bum, but I'm not making a lot of money. How is anyone supposed to pay a bill like that?" The under-insured is as big a problem as is the uninsured. It's a system based on the odds of the morbidity tables. In California and across the country 45 million uninsured people play "you bet your health".
Politicians will speak to us in numbers. We've heard them - 6.5 million Californians without health insurance. Catastrophic medical bills push 37% of folks into personal bankruptcy. 16% of our national expenditures are for health care. In Canada it is 5%. In the United States we spend $6200 per person on health care. In France it is $3200. (France by the way is rated by the World Health Organization the top health care system in the world. And how does the U.S. rank? We are at number 37 just behind Costa Rica and Slovenia.) And in France there are no waiting periods, you can choose your doctor, and if you can afford it, you can have your own private plan. 86% of the population though chooses the national plan.
But these numbers don't show you the faces of the problem. In my healthcare coverage consultancy business I see the stressed faces up close and personal and I know personally that we must join the rest of the world and provide universal coverage with a single payer system to better treat our people.
Why haven't we moved sooner to help our people? The answer lies in the powerful forces in opposition from the insurance and pharmaceutical companies and the public's fear that it will cost too much in higher taxes.
Well consider this.
Half of all Medi-Cal recipients are the result of their assets having been spent down to a destitute level from catastrophic medical bills and nursing care expenses. This alone costs the State's taxpayers billions annually. Personal bankruptcy forces businesses to write off bad debt or hire collection agencies which raise their costs which are passed to us in higher consumer prices. Fraudulent claims for tests not really done, overcharged services, or procedures falsely added to the bill cost the taxpayers, premium payers, and insurance companies in the State millions each year. And insurance companies by the way, have to spend money for sales, promotions, staff, underwriters, expensive television time, and a myriad of costs that only attract customers and "close deals" rather than providing lower premiums, co-pays, or deductibles for medical care.
So we are already paying billions out of our tax pockets for a broken system. And what's more we're only getting a whimper for our buck. 42% of your premium goes for administrative costs and profit and not toward coverage. That is why the business world has finally jumped on board the universal bandwagon. Not only is this the right thing to do for our citizens but it just makes economic sense.
We're already paying wasted billions in higher prices, costs, and taxes so why not re-distribute the cash flows to greater efficiencies and get a bigger bang for our buck and take much better care of our people? That is what our nation-state competitors have already done and we in the State of California, the 6th largest economy (equal to France), can lead the way just as we have done in energy conservation policy by passage of AB32. California always leads the way and we can do it again.
I also advocate strongly for a single payer system. We can still accommodate private insurers as they do in France and Germany, but single payer systems have proven throughout the world to be the best way to hold down costs. It may be counterintuitive to free market thinking where one looks for competition to hold down costs but in the medical coverage world, certainly proven by the American model, it increases costs.
The single payer system has its largest advantage in being able to negotiate down prices for both services and drugs. Canada actually buys drugs from the U.S. but is able to lop 60% off the price for its system through single-payer negotiating leverage. By the way, those cheap drugs that the FDA won't let us have down here are in fact purchased FDA approved drugs from the good 'ol USA. And we don't see a lot of Canadians dropping dead from cheap US drugs.
I also advocate a guarantee issue program where folks such as diabetics do not go wanting for care because of a pre-existing condition. And it should not cost them their life savings in higher premiums to have the coverage. In a pooled risk sharing environment that universal care provides, the healthy help the sick. That only seems fair.
I also would advocate the mandatory use of existing medical information technology systems such as VistaA which is available for free from the VHA. The VHA incidentally has become one of the best providers of healthcare in the country. Don't confuse the Walter Reed debacle with VHA because these are two entirely different systems. Walter Reed is strictly a military hospital. What the VistaA system achieves is the elimination of fraudulent behavior, more accurate and effective care, fewer mistakes in treatment and lowers costs dramatically. Few hospitals in our State have adopted this system and that needs to change.
I want deeply to be a part of this important topic and go to the legislature to bring greater fairness for California citizens and certainly greater peace of mind through effective health coverage policy. I am an avid student of the subject and have a close, knowledgeable perspective having been licensed by the State and having founded a business to advise Californian's where to best find coverage. Under our current system, I know personally that many people don't have much affordable choice.
While the Governor and legislators are currently crafting law to take the important first steps, I think the opposition forces will be too strong for us to achieve full universal coverage in the current session as much as I largely agree with proposed SB840. We may achieve coverage for at least our children this time around. But universal coverage has to be our goal. To do that, we need to raise the complement of Democratic legislators so that we can more strongly combat executive vetoes and that is single biggest reason I am running in the 15th Assembly district. This district has been Republican too long and we must change it.
I don't need your help. Our people do. If you help me then we help them.
 ENVIRONMENT
The State of California is ground zero for effective environmental management.
I strongly support proposals to ban oil drilling off our coast. I support efforts to clean up the toxic gasoline additive, MTBE, which has contaminated drinking water in our communities; and I support maximum fines for companies that negligently transfer and/or store MTBE and cause contamination. I also support a moratorium on any LNG stations currently being proposed for coastal installation. In addition, once-through-cooling, or OTH is a current threat to the ecological balance in the vicinity of coastal nuclear power plants  and should be addressed swiftly. Protecting the environment at times means sacrifice in the short term, but I know that Americans realize the value of safeguarding California's natural heritage for the enjoyment of future generations. The passage of AB32 is a hallmark milestone and but one example of how government can move us to reversing global warming.
Air quality is a top concern in the district, especially in the San Joaquin Valley. We must do more to reverse our dependence on oil and the carbon monoxide emissions that put our health and our environment at risk. We should invest in renewable fuels, research and development of alternative energy sources and raise fuel efficiency standards.
EDUCATION
A well-rounded and strong education is the foundation of true opportunity in this country. It is only with a good education that a person can succeed, not only in society but also in life.
Education improvements must be made across the board from universal pre-school programs to supporting our great public university system if we are to promise a better world for  our children. We must inspire our children to find the value in knowledge and find the passion for change that will later drive them through high school and through college.
I believe that education issues are best decided and implemented locally and that the primary role of the State is to provide financial and technical support added to the assurance of equal access to quality public schools.
Creating effective education for our children insures their future success as well as our ability to have a skilled workforce to compete in the global economy. We can make education a priority by increasing funding and by collaborating with educators to make the most effective decisions about the educational process.
I support increasing educational funding in order to:
- Improve teacher salaries - There is a teacher shortage and we need to be competitive with the private sector.
- Reduce class size - This enhances the education of every child.
- Adequately fund each educational category so valuable programs are not cut - This would include programs such as fine arts, sports, after school and special needs to provide diverse and challenging programs to keep students motivated.
No one knows the current needs of his or her students better than a teacher. Teachers need to be more involved in the decisions effecting curriculum and testing and given the resources to make a difference.
I will work with educators to:
- Ensure school safety
- Ensure effective curriculum
- Create a more effective state wide testing process that realistically measures student accomplishment
One State testing issue is the High School Exit Exam. Teachers want more flexibility with assisting students to graduate when there are unusual circumstances. They need realistic criteria to be developed. Special education students were once required to take this test as well until a class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of special education students to be exempted from taking this test. Special education departments have been expressing their concerns to the legislature for a long time, but have not been heard.
If educators were listened to more often, better decisions would be made and money would be saved.
TRANSPORTATION
Finding consensus on and funding sensible transportation solutions to the area's traffic congestion is critical to our quality of life and economic well-being. Congested roadways keep us from our families, contribute to respiratory illness, slow the transport of goods to a crawl and costs businesses in lost productivity.
Local stakeholders must prioritize transportation improvements and leverage this unity to stake our claim to our fair share of these dollars and also be able to attract matching federal funds. The local community has done an outstanding job of bringing attention and State dollars to the problem that is highway 4, 12, and the eastbound 580 corridor.
In the State House, I will:
- Support investments in inter-modal transportation stations to seamlessly connect commuters by bus, train and car.
- Work with state and local officials to fund an extension of BART to Tracy.
- Pursue an efficient high-speed rail system.
- Ensure that mass transit is more accessible to the elderly and the disabled.
- Work to learn from European and Japanese models for public transportation.
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