Opinion

A healthy debate over health care
Our view: Let there be more coverage in California, and let it begin with kids

Though our health care system is still ailing, at least a little color is returning to the cheeks of the local, state and federal efforts to fix it.

Consensus is growing that intervention is necessary. Annual federal health care spending roughly doubled to $1.6 billion in the decade before 2002, and is expected to double again before 2012, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Our nation spends about 15 percent of our gross domestic product on health care, and our health care system, while unparalleled in quality for the richest, continues to fail the less fortunate, as the U.S. trails other developed nations in life expectancy, infant mortality and preventable deaths.

An estimated 6 million Californians are uninsured. According to the Abaris Group's study of San Diego County's health care safety net, that vulnerable group without health insurance includes nearly 122,000 people living in North County and nearly 465,000 in the whole county.

We can, and must, do better.

The San Diego County supervisors agreed Tuesday to look for solutions, an improvement from past inaction only to the extent that good intentions are better than ignorance. The supervisors are hoping to hear, over the next few months, good ideas for how a $5 million, one-time investment can best help stitch the net's holes together. They're well aware that sum won't go very far in solving the problem, but it's better than nothing. We applaud the effort, more so the interest.

More promising still is the attention health care has been getting in Sacramento. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has made reducing the number of Californians without health coverage one of his priorities for 2007. Both Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata and Kaiser Permanente unveiled ambitious plans for fixing California's health care crisis this week; both contain interesting elements.

Perata's fellow Democrats in the Legislature are rallying around a universal health care bill like that rejected by the governor this year, but Schwarzenegger seems intent on at least extending coverage to the state's 800,000 uninsured children. This is a fine place to start, but it would be a shame to ring in 2008 without more progress than that.