Since California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger insists he will not raise taxes to balance the state's gaping budget hole, programs such as Healthy Families, the state's S-CHIP program, are still on the chopping block putting health insurance for a million children and their families at risk. We blogged about the California crisis a few weeks ago. It's only getting worse. So I made a video. A health video about a type of thinking that I called "Budget Syndrome."  A major symptom of this condition is "an obsessive focus on taxes and spending."  Side effects include "blindness to the true impact of cutting healthcare spending on our pocketbooks, on our economy, and on our lives."

 This sort of thinking is particularly problematic in healthcare.  As the Governor himself explained during his own push for health reform in 2007-08, the private market covers public shortfalls.  So cutting state health spending doesn't make the costs go away. They get shifted. That will lead to higher insurance premiums and out-of-pocket costs for us all.  And eliminating healthcare coverage for working families would hurt the state economy at the worst possible time as we pointed out last year in the Health Policy Program report, The Cost of Doing Nothing.

This video calls for Californians to take off their budgetary blinders when they think about state healthcare spending.  We can make real cuts, but these cuts will have real consequences and hence must be guided by our values as Californians.