In other legislation news, Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed bills that would have required large employers to spend a certain percentage of their total wages on healthcare insurance and that would have created a single-payer government-run health care system.
One bill, S.B. 1414—known as the California Fair Share Health Care Act—would have required for-profit employers with 10,000 or more employees in the state to spend at least 8 percent of their total
wages on healthcare insurance or pay the difference to the state. The legislation would have required large nonprofit organizations to pay at least 6 percent of their total wages on healthcare insurance or pay the difference to the state.
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The governor, in his veto message, stated: “Unfortunately, S.B. 1414 does nothing to address the health care challenges we face. Singling out large employers and requiring them to spend an arbitrary amount on health care does nothing to lower costs or guarantee that even one more person has health care coverage. In fact, S.B. 1414 will do little more than lead to expensive legal challenges. A Maryland law similar to S.B. 1414 was recently struck down by the courts as preempted by federal law.”
The governor also vetoed S.B. 840, which would have permitted California to establish a government-run health care system, to do away with private insurance companies. The idea behind the measure was that funding would come from payroll and individual income taxes.
In vetoing the bill, the governor said: “Socialized medicine is not the solution to our state’s health care problems. The 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.”
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