Work Begins on Expanding Care : Health: A top-level task force sets out to extend basic benefits to millions of uninsured California workers in what has been called the issue of the ‘90s.

A top-level group representing the governor, the Legislature and the state’s most powerful special interests began work Thursday on a plan to extend basic health care to more than 5 million Californians not now covered by any public or private medical insurance.

The task force, which includes representatives of employers, workers, insurers, doctors and hospitals, will try to weave its way through a political thicket and forge a consensus proposal for lawmakers to act on during the 1990 legislative session.

State Health and Welfare Secretary Clifford L. Allenby, who is heading the group, said that, other than relief for the victims of the Bay Area earthquake, the issue of health insurance will be the Deukmejian Administration’s “top priority” next year.

Allenby called the job a “formidable but not impossible task” as he convened the group of 18 men and one woman called together by the Administration in response to legislation by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco).

Brown’s bill originally would have required all California businesses with five or more full-time employees to provide insurance for their workers. Unable to win passage of that measure, Brown settled for a compromise that called for a study of the health insurance issue and a tax credit for businesses that offer insurance to their employees.

The task force’s charge is similar to one undertaken a year ago by another high-level coalition that sought to overhaul the state’s $8-billion system for compensating workers who are injured on the job. That group’s labors eventually led to the passage of legislation that fell short of the complete overhaul but was widely acknowledged as the most significant reform of the system in 20 years.

The workers’ compensation agreement was one of several that Gov. George Deukmejian and legislative leaders reached on major issues this past session after several years of stalemate. The health insurance negotiators hope to capitalize on that good will before Deukmejian leaves office at the end of 1990.

The author of the workers’ compensation bill, Democratic Assemblyman Burt Margolin of Los Angeles, attended Thursday’s session at the request of Speaker Brown. Margolin, who has long pushed without success for extending health insurance to every Californian, said he was encouraged by the gathering at one table of such a diverse array of interests.

“This group will frame the issue for 1990,” said Margolin, who is chairman of the Assembly subcommittee on health insurance. “Whatever we do next year will be in reaction to what happens here.”

Margolin cautioned, however, that any group that tries to develop a consensus on such a divisive issue runs the risk of producing a meaningless proposal that represents no more than “the least common denominator.”

“That is what I am here to try to guard against,” he said.

Other members of the task force, which will gather almost weekly in an attempt to meet a March 1 deadline, took turns Thursday expressing their points of view while pledging repeatedly to be flexible. Although everyone present agreed that the health insurance problem has reached crisis proportions, it was clear that no such unanimity exists on a solution.

Employers, for instance, said they want access to low-cost health policies. And they want incentives, rather than a requirement that they provide insurance.

“It is a question of affordability,” said Kirk West, president of the California Chamber of Commerce. West said 12% of the state’s gross economic product goes to health insurance, a figure that he contended is twice as high as California’s competitors in Japan and elsewhere.

But Thomas E. Rankin, a representative of the California Labor Federation, said that if businesses are seeking to reduce their costs, they will not succeed in doing it by reducing their obligation to their workers. He said it is “disgraceful” that only the United States and South Africa among industrialized nations do not provide universal health insurance for their citizens.

“Almost every labor dispute that occurs these days involves the issue of health benefits,” Rankin said.

Labor and management both have called for measures to contain the rising costs of health care. At the same time, hospital association officials said their members are already losing $1 billion a year providing care to people who have no means of paying for it.