With rapid speed, the Legislature this morning sent Governor Schwarzenegger a bill to step in and provide some temporary help for low-income and elderly Californians stuck in the Medicare reorganization quagmire.

The bill, AB 132, allocates up to $150 million to pay for prescription drugs that are supposed to be paid for by the federal Medicare program… but haven’t been in the last three weeks since a new reform program took effect. The snafu has affected about a million patients in California.

AB 132 sailed through both the Assembly and Senate by lunchtime, and was on its way to the governor– who, not coincidentally, was meeting in the state Capitol with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Michael Leavitt, who came to town to talk about the very same issue.