With apologies to Jimmy Buffett, the headline simply means that the next thing you’re going to hear about health care is what happens on the streets in 2008… and not what happens at the state Capitol for the rest of 2007.

The Assembly’s passage today of the Democratic health care bill AB X1 means that one hurdle has been cleared in the health care debate. But that bill will not be heard in the Senate this year — that’s the official word tonight from a spokeswoman for Senate President pro Tem Don Perata.

Perata, as blogged here earlier and elsewhere, wants a full analysis of AB X1’s potential fiscal impact to the state budget and its sagging fortunes. Assembly Democrats and Governor Schwarzenegger’s own staff have declared the bill to be, in legislative parlance, “revenue neutral”– meaning that it doesn’t help or hurt the state’s bottom line. They argue that’s because the deal calls for a funding mechanism that relies on new money (new employer and hospital fees, new tobacco taxes) and not existing state revenues.

Still, the top Senate Democrat wants to examine it for himself. And that raises another, more possibly challenging problem: it might become tougher to get the financing portion of the health care proposal onto the November 2008 ballot.

Why? Look no further than the intersection of time and money.

The initiative that would authorize all of these new fees still needs to be written. And if the Senate ultimately wants to tweak any of AB X1’s language, then those tweaks may need to be reflected in the initiative. In other words, can you really draft an initiative until the legislative process is completed?

Some health care insiders opined today that the Assembly-passed bill allows them to begin drafting the financing initiative now. But still others suggested that everyone will have to wait for the Senate, which apparently is not coming back until 2008.

Perata’s spokeswoman Alicia Trost said tonight that the Pro Tem believes that his delay to examine the fiscal impacts will not hurt the health care funding initiative’s chances to make the November 2008 ballot, because some initiatives have been qualified very quickly in times past.

That’s true, countered some Assembly sources… but this initiative needs to gather more than 1 million signatures. That’s far more sigs than initiatives that were circulated and qualified for the ballot in record time had to have.

One thing seems to be for sure: the faster that the initiative process needs to move, the more moolah that signature gathering professionals will likely demand. And that means the health care financing plan could force politicos– be they Democrats or the governor– to raise a hefty chunk of campaign cash.