Cutting Health Care Spending Will Not Save California
With the drama unfolding in Sacramento, it’s hard to believe we will ever get to universal health care coverage in this country. After fighting for the last two years to extend the federal SCHIP legislation to provide health care coverage for children of working families, California is actually considering eliminating the program! For the nearly one million children in California who are covered by the Healthy Families (California’s SCHIP program), this represents a serious threat to their health and development.
At a time when states across the country are struggling with a loss of revenue, there has never been a greater demand for public health care coverage. With mounting job losses, more than 300,000 children in California became uninsured between November 2007 and February 2009. Healthy Families, the State health coverage program for children, reached its second highest monthly enrollment in the program’s history, with nearly 35,000 children signing up for insurance in March 2009 alone.
The Governor is also seeking a $1 billion waiver from the federal government that would allow the State to cut Medi-Cal spending. While not specifying what these reductions might be, in the past they have included onerous paperwork requirements on children in Medi-Cal to renew coverage and denying coverage to parents earning more than $22,056 for a family of four. Implementing these changes could result in the loss of health coverage for nearly one million Californians.
The savings produced by these proposals are a mirage. Health care is one of the largest industries in California. These dollars represent not only health coverage, but jobs and tax revenue. A $1 billion rollback in state spending for Medi-Cal could result in the loss of $2.5 billion in business activity; 19,840 jobs; and $900 million in salaries and wages. At the same time, California could lose federal matching funds of nearly $560 million for Healthy Families and $1.6 billion for Medi-Cal.
California is taking two steps back, while the White House is trying to ensure health reform. Instead of cutting health care, we should be making sure all children are covered and using our health care dollars to create jobs and improve health.
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As my husband was preparing to leave the military, I had several medical issues that needed to be addressed, but we decided, with everything that was going on, to wait until we got home and address them with my medi-cal. Only to find out that my IEHP coverage had been dropped due to an error that then took six months to correct. It took so long for things to get straighten out that new “plans” have been passed and I no longer have dental or eye coverage. In this great plan to save Califonia money. People are going to end up getting more hurt. The fat cats with deep pockets should dig a little deeper instead of taking what little the rest of us have and depend on for survival.
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