BAY AREA COUNCIL TO PLAY KEY ROLE IN SPECIAL LEGISLATIVE SESSION ON HEALTHCARE

With healthcare set as the topic for a year-end special legislative session called by Governor Brown, the Bay Area Council is actively preparing a strong advocacy push to ensure California keeps its focus on implementing market-based solutions that emphasize controlling costs and creating a high-value, high-quality healthcare system. Healthcare is one of the Bay Area Council’s lead priorities. The special session will focus on legislation needed to implement the Affordable Care Act including its new marketplace for private insurance, the “Exchange”, which the Bay Area Council has been instrumental in developing.  Over the past month, we have brought together a coalition of member companies and stakeholder groups to strategize on a variety of issues that must be resolved before the Exchange can move forward. We’ve also been working to sideline legislation for creating a program that would take subsidies for the purchase of private insurance away from 800,000 Californians and put them into a new government run program, the Basic Health Plan.  As Senior Policy Advisor Micah Weinberg pointed out in an editorial in the Capitol Weekly, the numbers used to justify this program do not add up and it would further aggravate the shifting of costs to private businesses including Bay Area Council members.  To participate in our healthcare work, contact Micah Weinberg.