Governor has yet to build health-care case

Gov. Rod Blagojevich has made it clear for the past 10 or 11 months now that expanding the state's subsidized health-care program stands atop his priority list.

There's nothing particularly wrong with that; the governor's instincts happen to bend toward expanding government programs for those he thinks are most in need of help. It's certainly his prerogative to place that atop his agenda.

But the state's legislative agenda does not belong to this or any other governor alone. And the problem for Blagojevich is that he did not spell out a health-care agenda in his 2006 re-election campaign. He talked of expanded coverage, but he gave voters no inkling at all of how he intended to pay for it. Instead, after winning re-election, he announced that his budget would increase health-care spending by about $2 billion and that he would tax gross business receipts to the tune of more than $7 billion a year to pay for it and a plethora of other new spending initiatives.

State legislators, knowing full well that few of their constituents were clamoring for either this kind of health-care expansion or tax increases, resoundingly rejected the governor's plan.

Blagojevich has not given up. He used President Bush's veto of a proposed federal expansion of children's health care coverage to declare an Illinois health-care emergency. The governor announced plans to add nearly 150,000 parents and caregivers to state-subsidized health care, at an annual cost of some $300 million. Among the roughly 150,000 newly eligible people would be some with annual incomes of up to $82,000.

On Tuesday, a state legislative joint committee on rules prudently thwarted this attempt.

The rules panel voted 9-2 to block this move by the governor, in the process asking what legislators need to ask as often the governor tries this kind of stunt: How will a state already behind on reimbursing health-care providers pay for this? Unless and until there's a satisfactory answer to that question, there should be no major expansion of the kind the governor so badly wants.

There's a reason that legislators voted overwhelmingly against the proposed expansion last spring, and that's because there's insufficient public support. This is the governor's personal priority, not a priority of any identifiable majority of state residents.

The law of averages suggest that at some point the governor will come to understand that he cannot simply expand the state's health-care services on his own -- that he must first build consensus.

Until then, Illinois residents can be grateful for legislators who are doing their jobs and guarding against the next attempted end run.