UCLA Center for Health Policy Research compiles health care fact sheet
By Claire Makepeace
Oct. 22, 2009 10:52 p.m.
The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research recently released a fact sheet showing that if currently proposed health care reforms are passed, 93 percent of Californians will have health insurance.
Currently, there are 6.4 million children and non-elderly adults in California who do not have health insurance.
The leading proposals for health care reform in the Senate made two key changes to the current plan, according to the report. One would expanding Medicaid eligibility to qualified uninsured adults and children with household incomes up to 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Level. The other would provide subsidy funds to enable uninsured adults and children with household incomes from 134 to 400 percent of the Federal Poverty Line to purchase insurance.
This would make 4 million Californians newly eligible for either Medicaid or public subsidies.
However, California’s current budget crisis complicates matters.
“California can barely afford our Medicaid program that we currently have, so hopefully the federal government will be able to take the cost of that,” said Shana Lavarreda, author of the fact sheet and director of Health Insurance Studies.
Debates concerning the supplier of funding for the expansion of Medicaid continue in the Senate.
“Californian senators are currently working to get California included in the list of states whose health care expansion will be funded at a federal level, but this is not set yet,” Lavarreda said.
However, the proposed health care reforms would not allow Medicaid for immigrants.
“I think it’s unfair that they won’t even be able to spend their own money to get health insurance, and hopefully that is something which would be changed in the future,” Lavarreda said.
The report was put together using data from the California Health Interview Survey, which is conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research every two years, Lavarreda said.
She added that the research center uses this data to compile fact sheets that inform policy makers about the size and demographics of the population with which they are dealing.
“The fact sheet shows the potential that health care reform could have in this state in terms of the possibility of providing quality health care to the majority of citizens here,” said Gwendolyn Driscoll, publicist for the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
