I'll spare you the details of the event, for the imagination can surely concoct scenes wilder than I could even describe. But if you can imagine it, it happens at the Folsom Street Fair. And I think it's great. It's great to live in a city so tolerant that anything truly does go. No other American city comes to mind when thinking of an alternate home for the fair.

San Francisco is an amazing city, and I'm proud to call it home.

-Gabe

P.S. For those of you interested in our dog search, we adopted the sweetest eight-month-old retriever-husky mix last week. Stella's quite the handful -- non-stop energy and undying curiosity -- but she's already beginning to feel at home.

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The governor has selected Los Angeles, the nation's second-largest media market after New York City, to conduct his signing ceremony. The irony here is that the governor, ever the publicity maven, seeks the most visible forum possible to sign the bills, which were negotiated almost entirely in secret over a period of months before they went to the floors of the Legislature.

The centerpiece of the package is a bill that allows HMO patients -- there are about 15 million of them in California -- to sue their HMO when they suffer significant physical or financial harm that stems from the HMO's decision to delay or deny treatment. There is no question that this is a major benefit to consumers, although the original form of the legislation was watered down substantially during the closed-door negotiations in the governor's office.

The governor also intends to sign legislation that would shift California's responsibility over the regulation of HMOs, currently in the Department of Corporations, to a new entity called the Department of Managed Care. However, the new department -- much to the consternation of health care reformers -- will be located in the administration's business bureaucracy, the Business, Transportation and Housing Agency, rather than in what many view as a more logical location, such as the Department of Health Services or the Health and Human Service.

Reformers argue that ultimate authority over HMOs should be placed in the hands of health care professionals rather than business regulators. It was this notion, largely, that sparked the demands for regulatory reform in the first place to shift authority from the Corporations Department.

Just about everyone agrees that the Department of Corporations was the wrong agency to regulate HMOs, but the department was ordered to handle HMOs in the mid-1970s when the biggest fear about HMOs wasn't their medical quality but their fiscal solvency. The Department of Corporations also regulates brokers, investment bankers and others of similar ilk; its expertise clearly isn't health care, as even its own officials freely acknowledge.

The ultimate question, of course, is whether these changes will make any difference. The millions of people who get their medical care from HMOs certainly hope so.

Making campaign finance reports available online is a major political breakthrough, but the main reason was (in my humble opinion) only implicit in the article. What deserves to be stated explicitly is that the electorate will have access to ALL the information, not just the portion that a usually biased press chooses to publish.

Louis Jones
San Diego, Calif.

To the Editor,

I cannot share your enthusiasm for the dawning of this new age when electronic listings of campaign contributions will be available on the Web. As one who fought for and thought these reforms were important in the early and mid '70s, I now see them as having limited value. By placing the material on the Web, we will replace inaccurate statements by untrained journalists with inaccurate statements by regular people. We gain nothing.

Web listing is an interesting change but meaningless without the addition of some body of experts trained to read and evaluate what the reports are telling us (and what they are concealing). Campaigns have as much legal help as is required to make sure the report inflicts minimal damage. I have seen campaigns well financed by dirty money craft their reports so that everyone who reads them walks away with a warm feeling inside after seeing the thousands of $1 and $2 contributions from "little people" all over the district. The really important material is obscured by the very rules of reporting.

"The people" need some body of highly trained, neutral observers to review the reports completely and report. This cannot be the lawyers who run the current state and federal election reporting offices. They are useless when someone is actively disobeying the law and attempting to influence an election. Otherwise, we are all looking at highly crafted, careful statements designed to hide anything of interest -- unless you have come upon a report that described a $500 contribution as payment for a vote well cast. Brad Senden
San Ramon, Calif.

Why would you support full disclosure in the 1970s and then reject it later? You don't say why.

Even if one assumes that a person needs "experts" to interpret the obvious, there are many groups who have experts that do just that -- Common Cause and the California Voter Foundation are two examples that leap immediately to mind, but there are many others.

What could possibly be wrong with giving people more information than they have now? Finally, the best evidence that electronic filing is valuable is the very fact that politicians have fought it for years.

-- Capitol Action Staff

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