To hear the man who runs his state's new health insurance purchasing agency tell it, universal healthcare has been about the best thing to happen to Massachusetts since the Tea Party.

As California policymakers grapple with the excruciating details of reforms that would vastly expand health coverage in this state, Jon Kingsdale came to Sacramento last week at the invitation of the California HealthCare Foundation to give a firsthand report on his state's grand experiment.

Here is one attention-grabbing detail:

In April, it would have cost a 37-year-old man living in Boston $335 a month to purchase a $5,000 deductible plan with no drug benefit and no exclusions to the deductible.

Today, he can purchase a far better plan — a $2,000 deductible with drug benefits and routine care covered outside the deductible — for $184 a month.

Further, because Massachusetts requires employers to offer a pre-tax payroll deduction to pay the premiums, that fellow saves $75 a month on taxes. His net cost: $109 a month.

"We've brought $335 down to $109," said Kingsdale, who heads the Commonwealth Health Insurance Connector Authority. "We literally have half the price and twice the benefits."

What's more, Kingsdale noted, anyone in Massachusetts can go to the authority's Web site and shop for health insurance in a process as simple as buying a book on Amazon.

Fill in your ZIP code, your date of birth and your occupation, then click. Up pops a grid that lists a range of Connector-approved plans, a comparison of the benefits and the cost of each. Pick one, click again, pay the bill, and you've got health insurance. You can't be rejected because of age or medical history.

"We've brought transparency to health insurance," he said. "I've been amazed at the response to this level of transparency."

The system works in large part, he said, because Massachusetts requires everyone to have insurance. "The individual mandate," he said, "is so critical to our reform."

All that said, Kingsdale readily acknowledged that California is a far different laboratory. In Massachusetts before reform, only 6 percent of the population was uninsured, or about 140,000 people. In California, about 20 percent are uninsured, or more than 6 million people.

"It's nice to be the size of Switzerland or Holland, and not half the size of Germany, as you are here," he said.

Massachusetts was also able to deal with the issue of affordability in ways California may not be able to match. It provides subsidies to everyone earning up to 300 percent of poverty income, or $41,070 a year for a couple. It doesn't assume any couple making less than $68,450 can find affordable insurance, and exempts about 60,000 people from the mandate.

But success in Massachusetts, Kingsdale said, is more a function of politics than demographics. The plan is working, he said, because everyone believes in it.

The reform received only two negative votes in the Legislature. It was supported by business, labor, doctors and hospitals. The end product belongs to everybody.

"In Massachusetts, for some reason, it's become more important to make this thing work than to do it my way. They're protecting their baby," Kingsdale said.

Somewhere in the Massachusetts experience are some lessons for California lawmakers as they enter the final sprint that will determine whether significant health reform is enacted before they adjourn in less than three weeks.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and the four top legislative leaders met Tuesday to talk about the issue, and after some chest-thumping last week there were signs that cooperation may now be in the offing.

"The focus this week is to come to a compromise on health reform," said Aaron McLear, the governor's press secretary, on Tuesday.

An administration official said that after a year of broad discussion, "We really are down to the details Now it's all about negotiation and agreement."

The "agreement" part is critical. Over the last week, two key players have moved in the right direction. The California Hospital Association said it is getting close to signing off on a provider tax that Schwarzenegger says is essential, and the California Restaurant Association expressed a willingness to talk.

If California is going to succeed with healthcare reform this year, a lot of groups are going to have to swallow hard over the next two weeks and decide that it's more important to fix the system than it is to protect their turf.

They must, in short, heed this piece of advice Kingsdale offered before leaving the Capitol: "You don't want to do health reform on a 51-49 vote."

— Timm Herdt is chief of The Star's state bureau. His e-mail address is therdt@VenturaCountyStar.com.