Whenever health insurance companies face real political pressure they know it’s best to change the messenger. Their executives and spokespeople clam up and turn to paid surrogates who attack reformers in order to take the public’s eye off the ball: health industry price gouging.
 
With the heat turning up nationally for California single payer proposal Senate Bill 562 (Lara),  which threatens to upend industry profiteering, the same paid attack dogs who came out against regulating skyrocketing health insurance premiums are back.
 

Four Democrats currently have the power to determine who really runs the state of California’s fossil fuel policies—policymakers or a major energy company named Sempra.

The litmus test: Whether these Democrats vote for SB 57, a bill authored by Henry Stern that requires the state and Sempra’s subsidiary Southern California Gas to reveal what caused the biggest methane well blowout in US history before the Aliso Canyon gas reserve is allowed to reopen.

It took a voter revolt 29 years ago to force the insurance industry to start pricing auto insurance in California based on how well and how much you drive, instead of who you are or where you live. Before that, drivers in inner cities and other “undesirable” zip codes (read: low-income, minority) had to pay a fortune for auto insurance, if they could buy it at all. Prop 103’s insurance reforms changed that. Or at least they were supposed to.