The LA Times ran an article on San Francisco’s health plan, and while the article is pretty positive, I was struck by the way the plan was described as springing full-born from Gavin Newsom’s head.

Newsom began studying the matter. City officials estimated that they were spending $111 million annually to treat the uninsured at San Francisco General Hospital. Why not, Newsom and his staff asked, take some of that money and invest in prevention so that underprivileged residents would not have to resort to hospital visits to treat illnesses?

“We simply asked a profoundly different question,” Newsom said. “For years, people here beat their head against the wall figuring out how to provide universal health insurance to the uninsured. Then we asked another question: How do we provide universal health care? That made all the difference.”

Given that standing in the way of the Mayor’s self-promotion efforts is to suffer death by a thousand paper cuts from the blizzard of press releases coming out of Room 200 every day, it seems reasonable to let Newsom take credit for the health plan in exchange for actually passing it. And for those of us who actually care about making sure every San Franciscan gets health care, the trade- off is worth it. It’s still frustrating, though, because it both perpetuates the myth of Newsom as this great font of innovative policy ideas and makes it hard for other cities to follow our example.

The successful passage of health care for San Franciscans is not the result of the Mayor getting a brainstorm and gathering his staff and saying “go out there and give me universal health care.” It’s not even the result of Tom Ammiano waking up one day and saying “y’know what would be really cool? Health care for everyone.” It’s a result of years of organizing by many San Franciscans who understand that we all deserve health care. It’s the result of hundreds of meetings and dozens of rallies. In short, it’s the result of organizing.