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 Hijacked
California Healthcare
Needed: conservative watchdogs…
[Chuck DeVore] 12/15/05
What
has $4.5 billion and provides millions of dollars per year
to the left in California and won’t stop until California
has universal, government-run, and fully unionized healthcare?
The answer, three foundations created by
Blue Cross’ conversion from non-profit to for-profit status from
the late-80s to the mid-90s: The California Endowment, The California Wellness
Foundation and the California HealthCare Foundation.
These three
entities, hijacked by the liberal activists on their boards,
fund political activity, liberal consumer rights groups such
as the Consumers Union (the publisher of Consumer Reports),
and the ACLU, the CTA teachers union, Planned Parenthood, the
National Center for Lesbian Rights (the latter for something
called, the “Transgender Healthcare Action Project”),
and on and on, as the millions in grants to the inane, the
PC, the left-wing, the simply weird, and occasionally, the
sane, stretch into the hundreds.
Contributors
Chuck DeVore
Assemblyman Chuck
DeVore represents 450,000 residents of Orange County
California’s
70th Assembly District.. He served as a Reagan White House
appointee in the Pentagon from 1986 to 1988 and was Senior
Assistant to Cong. Chris Cox. He is a lieutenant colonel in the Army
National Guard. Chuck’s novel, CHINA
ATTACKS, sells internationally and has been translated
into Chinese for sales in Taiwan. [go to DeVore index] |
As an example
of the mega-foundations’ increasingly sophisticated
political tactics, The California Wellness Foundation gave Karen
Bass, a Los Angeles community and healthcare activist, a $12,500
grant on October 24, 2003. Interestingly, the cash came six weeks
after Ms. Bass began her campaign for the Democrat Party nomination
to the State Assembly. Several staffers involved in the grant
process at The California Wellness Foundation also contributed
to Ms. Bass’ campaign. Less than two months after the cash
grant, Ms. Bass loaned her campaign $34,000, boosting her effort
to eclipse the far better known former L.A. City Councilman Nate
Holden and two others to win the primary and go on to represent
the 47th Assembly District. The very talented and very liberal
Assemblymember Bass is now on the fast track to leadership in
the Assembly’s powerful Democrat Caucus and holds universal
health care as one of her chief interests.
The current target of the billion dollar healthcare
foundation cabal is California’s large and effective non-profit hospital
system. To the critics of this system such as Health Access California,
the California Budget Project, and Consumers Union (all on the
foundations’ payroll, by the way), the non-profits make
too much profit, pay their managers too much, and don’t
do enough to provide free healthcare to the poor. Add to that
the SEIU labor union’s gripe that the hospitals aren’t
unionized enough, and you have a potent mix of charges sure to
move California’s left-tilting legislature to action.
Hospital systems such as Kaiser Permanente, Sutter
Health, and Catholic Healthcare West counter the critics with
hard facts:
when $40 billion in required seismic retrofit costs plus capital
construction are considered, there is little to no profit remaining,
they pay their managers what the market dictates, and they do
help the poor by, among many ways, subsidizing money-losing hospitals
in underprivileged areas – something for-profit hospital
chains are loathe to do.
What will happen if the attack on California’s
non-profit hospital system succeeds? The non-profits will likely
be forced
to convert to for-profit businesses so they can survive by raising
the capital needed to compete. This will leave ordinary, working
class Californians will little choice in health care. There will
then be two systems: the private, for-profit one for the rich
and the government-run and fully unionized one for everyone else.
With salaries and benefits in excess of $600,000
per year, I guess we know which hospital system the three healthcare
foundation
CEOs will use, don’t we?
In the end, this episode shows one fundamental truth: liberals
are willing to invest tremendous energy to create for themselves
engines of change to forcibly remake America in their image.
Where are the three foundations that conservatives have hijacked
with a net worth of $4.5 billion?
The solution? Get a few conservatives on the boards of these
three foundations to hold them accountable. Unwatched, they will
become even more aggressive in funding candidates and causes
that are no doubt contrary to their ostensible mission. CRO
copyright
2005 Chuck DeVore
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