S.F. Chronicle
December 24, 2000

A place where every child will have health care
By Mike Weiss

Politics has become so degraded, so relentlessly reduced to the attack-dog mentality of getting elected, that we can easily forget it is also supposed to be about achievement. But in San Jose and Santa Clara County, politicians have just accomplished on a local scale what Hillary Clinton couldn't sell on a national scale.

In this season of acrimony, Santa Clara County approved the first program anywhere in the country to provide universal health care to every single child who lives there.

As things stand, about 71,000 kids, age 18 and younger, currently have no health insurance. Now they will receive coverage for vision, dental and comprehensive medical care.

At long last, one community in America has begun to acknowledge what all other freedom-loving democracies have long accepted -- that health care is a basic human right.

How ironic that this first baby step on the path to the only remedy that will save our health-care system from financial disaster, and our souls in the bargain, should be taken in a place more known for its conspicuous consumption than its charity.

Of course, it was not the computer industry that put forward the Children's Health Initiative.

It was, rather, a coalition of groups spearheaded by a progressive labor movement, a phrase so anachronistic that typing it seems akin to wearing tie-dyes. Yet that's what happened.

"The initiative is part of a much broader program to build an alternate policy agenda to the one elites have built," say Amy Dean, leader of the South Bay Labor Council and the most dynamic unionist in Northern California. "Not since Medicare has something this comprehensive been proposed and passed. We intend to go forward in other counties around the country."

Passage wasn't easy. At first, San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales, whose ambition awes even the ambitious, opposed the Children's Health Initiative. He framed his objections as opponents of basic decency always do in obstructionist arguments about how best to proceed.

The wily know that by the time you stop arguing about how to do something worthwhile, the goal itself has been bled to death. That's what happened to the Clintons' attempt at a comprehensive and equitable health-care system.

But proponents of the initiative wouldn't let it happen. Gonzales was ferociously and relentlessly lobbied until he capitulated, perhaps in part because he needed to repair his political relations in the aftermath of an affair with an aide half his age.

Whatever the reason, the plan has three components. I lay them out not to Goreify them but because they could provide a blueprint for projects closer to home.

First, Santa Clara County is going to try to find every kid who needs coverage. That's trickier than it might seem but county health officials plan to work with school districts, among others, and snare kids signing up for school lunches.

Secondly, premiums will be subsidized for families that can't afford even the low-priced federal and state programs already in place.

Thirdly, and most exciting -- and here organized labor's participation made a difference - the children of the working poor will get coverage. Many of the oft-cited 38 million Americans without health insurance earn too much to qualify for government help but not enough to buy their own coverage.

If all goes well, every kid in the county will have access to dentists, opticians and doctors. That this is a good thing is self-evident: good for the beneficiaries, for the community, for the county budget in the long run, and for what it says about who we are.

"We are," as Santa Clara County Supervisor Blanca Alvarado put it," on the brink of doing something incredibly powerful and helpful." The cost of this splendid thing is about $14 million annually, with much of it coming from tobacco settlement funds and tobacco tax money, and more still to be raised from charities and businesses.
That's for 71,000 kids.

Here in less populous San Francisco, the Department of Public Health estimated in 1998 that there were 13,00 uninsured children. And we have a shiny bright new Board of Supervisors about to take office, a board that is supposed to be forward-thinking, community-oriented and independent.

Is there any reason in the world for the San Francisco supervisors not to do as much for our children as Santa Clara supervisors have done for theirs in the Valley of Greed?