Ma v. Ja: How Janet Reilly Got Kissed, Got Wild, And Got A Health Care Plan
We have been totally obsessed with Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan's Opal Mehta woes. Every day, we would think, Bostonist is so lucky. Isn't there any connection here to the Bay Area?
Well, now we have one! And for our Assembly District 12 Ma v. Ja column, no less! State legislator (and former child actor) Sheila Kuehl has accused Janet Reilly of plagiarizing Kuehl's health care proposal and claiming it was her (Reilly's) own. Get Kissed Get Wild!
Reilly claims it's not true, and that Kuehl is supporting "Sacramento interests" who want Ma elected over her. Kuehl requested that a reporter asking her about that allegation say, "make sure to say that I laughed uproariously at that," claiming that Sacramento interests hate her (Kuehl). Given that Kuehl's other big news is that she's trying to get gay history into textbooks, we believe Kuehl on that one.
Matier and Ross report that Reilly says she might have used some of Kuehl's ideas, but it's all footnoted in her proposal. Reilly also says at least she has a health care plan, unlike Fiona Ma.
So what's going on? Did Reilly actually get kissed and get wild? We do a little investigation into the claims, after the jump. Only a little, though.
So we looked through the footnotes on Reilly's plan and don't see anything crediting Kuehl -- but we do see an awful lot of citations to the hard work of Health Care For All, which is an organization pushing for single-payer health care and working with .... Sheila Kuehl. Hmmm.
Unfortunately, we don't see any kind of smoking gun, like those long passages from Megan McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts that magically reappeared in Ms. Viswanathan's book -- mostly because Kuehl's stuff is written like a law, and Janet Reilly's is in a voter-friendly handbook format, filled with soft-focus pictures of frolicking children, Janet in a factory, Janet in a hospital, and plastic keys (we're not sure what the plastic keys are about) -- but they do basically put forth the exact same idea -- one state agency that would be charged with providing health care for all eligible California residents.
Sure, it's a pretty basic idea, and we would be inclined to write this all off as Kuehl being maybe a little overly possessive about her legislation, except for the fact that Janet continually refers to the idea as "the Janet Reilly Plan" in her literature. Well, and also the fact that Reilly states on her website,
"So Why Aren’t We Doing Something About This [single payer health coverage statewide]? . . . So what’s the problem? Quite frankly, politicians just aren’t getting the job done. Bold solutions are risky to politicians worried more about re-election than about working families who struggle to pay for their next trip to the doctor."
(emphasis added). Okay, in light of that, it seems either kind of churlish, or kind of spacey, of Reilly not to at least credit Sheila Kuehl, who's been working on getting state-wide single payer health care for over two years. Well, it could have been worse, Reilly could have said Sheila Kuehl worked for Republicans in South Dakota.
Our conclusion? Well, Reilly probably didn't get kissed and get wild -- but it does kind of look like she might have at least based her health care plan on someone else's ideas, and passed them off as her own. Less of a plagiarizer, more of a biter.