One need not be a pollster or political scientist to conclude that with each passing day, California voters have become increasingly wary and frustrated with government's (in)ability to get it right.  Once again, our state faces a multibillion dollar deficit and the news will not get better for many years to come.

How are taxpayers expected to have any faith that the very politicians and bureaucrats that have mismanaged government agencies, departments and budgets time after time would be any more competent assuming and managing something as critically important as healthcare? 

The sad but proven truth is that government-run healthcare will add more bureaucracy and a hefty price tag to California taxpayers, small businesses and jobs.  That is why the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) so strongly opposed a recent single-payer proposal in the form of Senate Bill 810 (Leno).

It is patently false to assume that small business owners couldn't care less about healthcare reform. They do-but solutions for Main Street and every Californian must start with cost containment, incentives, and flexibility in designing appropriate healthcare coverage. However, legislators continually reject proposals that would expand access and lower costs through greater competition and fairness, choosing instead to say, "My way or the highway."

NFIB and many other associations representing the employers who provide jobs in California and around the nation support healthcare reform that protects the right of healthcare consumers to choose and empowers them to make decisions.  SB 810 and other ‘anti-choice' healthcare reforms provide no such option.

We also believe that a fair marketplace demands equal treatment of consumers regardless of how they purchase their healthcare.  Today, Big Labor and Big Business can purchase healthcare as a large national group, but federal law prevents small businesses from banding together to gain a level-playing field.  Discrimination.

Owners of many small businesses cannot deduct their own healthcare insurance costs or participate in the very plans they offer to their employees while corporate CEOs write off Cadillac plans.  More discrimination.

As a result of California's weakened economy, many businesses in our state have been unable to provide healthcare coverage as they desire. Mandating such coverage will at best delay recovery in the future and will likely lead to California falling further behind.

The fundamental and grim reality that our leaders must understand is that our state is both broke and broken. Adding a mammoth healthcare machine will only make accessibility to affordable healthcare more of a distant reality and result in higher costs, rationed care, and suffering taxpayers.   One estimate from the non-partisan Legislative Analyst's Office put the price tag at well over $200 billion, but that number really reflects the cost of what single-payer would replace.  Therefore, we really have little idea what this mammoth program would really cost.  We do know that the ‘modest' proposal languishing in Congress is estimated to cost taxpayers around $1 trillion and it would still leave millions of Americans uncovered. 

Wiping out the existing system in favor of a state-controlled healthcare system assumes that all cost increases are relative to administrative costs and business profits, but totally ignores the impact of benefit mandates, frivolous litigation, technological and pharmaceutical advancements in treatment.

With no comprehensive financing structure included in SB810, it appears the most this bill would accomplish is the creation of a new bureaucracy and put off the decision of what Californians will be expected to pay for another day.   Is that really how we want - or deserve - to have our elected leaders setting policy for the eighth largest economy in the world?

But our elected leaders, in their infinite wisdom, may be onto something.  In the last nine years, while private employers lost around 650,000 jobs, government employment grew by about 130,000. If that pace continues, we may all end up working for the government one day, so in reality there will be very little, if anything, in the State that won't be classified as "single-payer."