SACRAMENTO — Who knows? Twenty years from now, Californians may look back at Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez as courageous visionaries for championing healthcare reform.
These could be the "good ol' days" when fearless leaders forged ahead, undeterred by a projected $14.5-billion budget hole, and crafted a $14.4-billion government expansion of healthcare -- requiring affordable medical insurance for practically every Californian.
They ignored guys like me who wrote that the governor should "pull the plug" on drawn-out healthcare negotiations and focus solely on bailing out the badly listing ship of state.
But because Schwarzenegger truly was an action governor and the Democratic speaker cast partisanship aside, all children were provided medical care. Adults no longer were denied insurance merely because they'd had a prior serious illness.
Unemployed people in their vulnerable 50s, not old enough for Medicare, finally obtained affordable insurance. Local clinics were expanded to make healthcare more accessible.
The state's sinking ship ultimately righted itself. The fiscal storm blew over and was soon forgotten.
As Republican Mayor Alan Autry of Fresno said during a celebratory cast-of-thousands news conference in the Capitol rotunda after Assembly passage of the healthcare bill: "We have some tough budget times ahead of us, but it's un-American to let our condition of the moment dictate our vision.
"If that [were] the case, we would have never made it out of the Great Depression."
That's one scenario.
Here's another:
Schwarzenegger and Nunez in the future will be derided as reckless, self-promoting fools who cobbled together an under-funded scheme that finally bankrupted the state.
Raising the cigarette tax $1.50 per pack to help finance healthcare expansion? Talk about delusional! Tobacco use continues to decline -- and it will even more steeply when the cigarette tax is nearly doubled. Combine declining tax revenue with escalating medical costs and that's a formula for a busted program.
Moreover, many small businesses that don't already provide medical insurance will go belly up trying to pay a new employer fee into a state pool created to help workers obtain coverage.
Universal healthcare in California will be looked back upon as a cruel hoax that raised false hopes and finally had to be abandoned, making the public even more cynical of Sacramento.
