>Any idea how much the Alachua County ballot campaign cost?
Yes, just under $12,000. (The county has maybe 300,000 people). We raised half of it with a signature ad. Our expenses were so low and reach so puny (perhaps 20,000 pieces of literature) that it was clear to me that most people voted for it, not because they'd heard of it before, but because they liked what they saw on the ballot. Oddly, it was endorsed by the local paper. It was nonbinding, so we had no serious opposition except the legal challenge.
The ballot text read:
"Do you favor legislation to create a system of universal health care in Florida that provides all residents with comprehensive health care coverage (including the freedom to choose doctors and other health care professionals, facilities and services) and eliminates the role of insurance companies in health care by creating a publicly administered health insurance trust fund? This trust fund would receive the funds presently going to the numerous health insurance companies throughout the state."
>I'm amazed that Nathan thinks that the defeat in California is enough
>reason to give up on the big stuff and do the "fair share" campaigns
>instead. What happened to learning from your defeat and trying again?
>If the right had given up after Goldwater's defeat in 1964, we'd
>never have had Reagan as president.
Also, that was more than a decade ago. Insurance costs have risen terrifyingly since then. Massachusetts came a lot closer to winning statewide, not bad considering the campaign was split. But in a state like Florida, with a constitutional prohibition on an income tax, the obstacles to a fair funding mechanism are fairly formidable. Fair share at least has the virtue of attacking large employers, which many of the other incremental poverty-program patches don't have. But it's still a patch, it still focuses on the 'poor,' it still evades the fundamental issue (from the perspective of working-class power and independence) which is job-linked health insurance.
Jenny Brown