Full Text of Proposition

What does it do? Requires that businesses with more than a certain number of employees (more than 200, starting in 2005; more than 50, starting in 2006) provide health insurance coverage for their employees, either by buying into a state government provided plan or by purchasing it from a third-party source. Caps employee contribution to health care at 20% of the cost. Various other fiddly complicated provisions.

How I plan to vote Yes

Why? Providing good health care coverage to as many as possible is a huge problem, and I'm not sure that this is the perfect solution. (In fact, I don't really believe in perfect solutions.) However, it seems clear to me that this would provide insurance to a lot of Californians who don't have it. And, call me a loony liberal if you want, but I don't automatically assume, as the opponents of this measure do, that the government-provided health care plan would automatically be sucky or inefficient. In fact, the opponents of this proposition don't really seem to have their arguments together. In addition to the 'OMG! Government program=bad!11!1!one!!' part of the argument, they trot out the delightful estimate that the average California family might pay as much as $1700 a year for health coverage if this proposition passes. Which looks like an okay deal when, according to the proponents, the average family currently pays nearly $2500 a year for health insurance. (No, I have no idea where those numbers come from, and I'm taking them with a grain of salt. I did some quick poking around on the internet, but haven't been able to sort out any hard statistics out of the mass of web sites offering health insurance quotes and economics articles explaining why health care is damned expensive.)