By Landon Hall
The Orange County Register, Oct. 2, 2010
IRVINE, Calif. – Bill Honigman, an emergency-room doctor at Kaiser Permanente in Anaheim and Irvine, says the only way to make real progress on a health care overhaul is to get rid of private insurance companies altogether.
“Ultimately,” he says, “we’re going to have to muscle them out of the system.”
Just like that? It’s one reason Honigman and his colleagues, who call themselves the “Mad as Hell Doctors,” face an uphill struggle in their fight to get the United States, starting with California, to adopt a single-payer system that covers everyone, at government expense.
Honigman shared the stage Saturday night with three other doctors – two from Corvallis, Ore., and another from the Bay Area – who have been touring California for the past week and a half addressing crowds both big and small about the inefficiencies of the current system. They don’t think much of the Obama administration-backed bill that became law six months ago, saying it was written by and for insurance companies.
They see California as a battleground because a bill that would establish a single-payer system (SB840) has twice passed both houses of the Legislature, only to be vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger. Dr. Marc Sapir, a primary-care physician in Hayward, said the failure of a similar measure (SB810) to advance robbed the public of the opportunity to learn about single-payer.
Honigman said the vetoes showed that the governor is on the side of big business and not the people.
“But we will bring it to the next session,” he said, noting that Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, plans to reintroduce SB810.
More than 100 people, mostly older, sat in the pews of the politically active Irvine United Congregational Church to listen to the “mad” doctors — Honigman, Sapir, Paul Hochfeld and Mike Huntington of Corvallis, and church member Howard Emery of Yorba Linda – give a nearly two-hour presentation. It’s a complicated subject, they acknowledged.
“Our goal is to give you the intellectual tools and the courage and the commitment and the insight to talk to your friends and your neighbors, and your Fox News-watching uncle, sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table,” Hochfield said.
Steve Bell, 61, of Laguna Niguel, brought his stepdaughter Lindsey Buss, 25, and her boyfriend to the town hall-style meeting to learn more about single payer.
“We didn’t get health reform, we got insurance reform,” Bell said. “Once the reform implodes, which I’m sure it will, then maybe we’ll get another look at single payer.”
Another person in the audience taking careful notes was Christina Avalos, a Democrat who is running against Rep. Ed Royce in the 40th District.
“We’re not informed enough, and that’s what events like this are about,” Avalos said. “I plan to disseminate this information at the federal level so we can make it a national priority.”
Huntington said that even if Attorney General Jerry Brown is elected as governor, there’s no guarantee he’d sign single payer into law if it were to pass the Legislature again.
“He has never committed that to anyone,” Huntington said. “So regardless of who gets elected, we feel that this has to be a movement that involves lots of groups. If he’s going to be brave enough to sign a single-payer bill, he has to feel that there’s lots of support behind him.”
Contact the writer: lhall@ocregister.com or 714-196-2221
http://www.ocregister.com/news/payer-269330-single-honigman.html