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What a stirring challenge. Bring California back from the precipice before they plunge into the Pacific Ocean.

Democrats do not have the gumption to fight a war, they cannot maintain the peace, and now, they have become less and less able to carry out even the most pedestrian tasks of civil governance.

What they can do well, is blame almost anyone else but themselves when the fecal matter hits the high-volume air redistribution device.

Daniel Weintraub: Davis finally gets religion on reforming worker comp
By Daniel Weintraub -- Sacramento Bee Columnist
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, August 17, 2003
If it's true that nothing so wonderfully concentrates the mind like the prospect of a hanging in the morning, Gov. Gray Davis might be forgiven for focusing more than usual on his remaining legislative priorities. This is the governor's fifth year in office, and he's become famous in the Capitol for keeping his agenda a secret. Now, facing what he perceives to be a political lynching, Davis has issued a list of the things he'd most like to accomplish after the Legislature returns Monday from its summer recess.
One of his goals is to overhaul the state's workers compensation system, which is supposed to help injured workers return to the job and compensate them for wages lost. California's program is badly out of whack and nearing collapse, with employers paying the highest premiums in the nation and workers getting benefits that have been among the lowest in the country.

Premiums have been rising fast for several years. The owner of a Stockton hair salon told me the other day she pays $7,000 a year for three employees in low-risk jobs, about double what she paid two years ago. I've heard similar stories from all over the state. Injured workers, meanwhile, complain that the system grinds them down in endless confrontations with insurance companies, who take their own cut in the exchange.
"There's a recognition that something has to be done to bring costs under control," Daniel Zingale, the governor's cabinet secretary, told me in an interview.

Of course, the problem didn't appear overnight, and Davis should have worked harder to fix it earlier. But as with many of the state's problems, workers compensation to him was not so much about real people suffering but an insiders' game, labor versus business, or insurance companies against the lawyers.

Last year, when lawmakers passed a bill increasing benefits for the injured workers, Davis could have insisted that they include major reforms to cut costs in the system. But he mostly stayed out of that fight and let the Democrats who control the Legislature work it out. The result wasn't pretty.

Now he is clearly focused. The governor has endorsed about a dozen bills pending in the Legislature, and has given Zingale his proxy to oversee his end of the negotiations. Zingale, in turn, has worked closely with Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi and the members of a legislative conference committee to try to fashion a comprehensive package of reforms that could save as much as $3 billion in the $15-billion-a-year system.

"The one principle the governor has made clear is that we won't do it on the backs of injured workers in need of health care," Zingale said.

Before he took his current job in the governor's inner circle of aides, Zingale was head of the Department of Managed Health Care, where he got generally high marks from consumer groups and insurers. He noted that many of the factors driving up the cost of workers compensation might actually be bad for health care, including over-utilization and inappropriate medical treatment. Doctors, in other words, running up their bills at the expense of the rest of us.

The governor hopes to reduce medical costs by doing more to detect unusual and unnecessary medical practices. He would also ease the confrontational nature of the system by allowing independent medical review, which has worked in managed care to give patients more comfort that their health plans were basing decisions on medical necessity and not finances.

Another cost-saver might be a proposal to tie fee schedules for workers comp health care to the federal Medi-Care program. Although considered stingy, those rates would help prevent the sort of runaway costs now plaguing the system.

The talks have been bipartisan, but some Republican-backed measures already have been tossed aside. Among the rejects: a proposal to prevent the payment of permanent disability benefits for injuries that can't be verified by objective medical evidence. "There was not sufficient support for that," Zingale said. "There are conditions where a self-report should be allowed, for debilitating pain that doesn't show up on an X-ray."

Zingale says he doubts Davis will get everything he wants from the Legislature. But he is confident that a solid package of bills will emerge before the end of the session. "The struggle is, when you get down to the details, everybody has to sacrifice something to bring costs under control," he said.

An effective fix for the troubled work comp program would be a big victory for Davis, and Californians, heading into this historic election season. In a way, that would be fitting. The voters added the workers comp system to the state constitution at a special election in 1911, on the same day they approved another set of reforms aimed at helping working people fight powerful interest groups: the initiative, the referendum and the recall.

Democrats do not have the gumption to fight a war, they cannot maintain the peace, and now, they have become less and less able to carry out even the most pedestrian tasks of civil governance.

Worth repeating!!!