California: Ground Zero For The Health Care Crisis

On Monday morning the final regional White House forum on health care reform will be held in Los Angeles and at satellite sites throughout California, in San Diego, Oakland and Clovis. Details can be found at HealthReform.Gov. California certainly figures as a good place to talk about health care reform; a study released today by Families USA shows that 37% of all Californians were without health insurance during all or part of 2007 and 2008.

About 12.1 million Californians, or 37% of non-senior residents, were uninsured for at least one month during 2007 and 2008, Ron Pollack, executive director of Families USA, a Washington, D.C.-based group, said Thursday.

Most of them were uninsured for at least six months, Pollack said, and more than 80% of them were in working families. Minorities were more likely to be uninsured; 53% of Latinos and 38% of blacks were uninsured during the two-year period; for whites, 25% were uninsured.

They were among the 86.7 million U.S. residents who went without insurance for at least one month during the same two-year period, according to the organization's count.

The legislature is working to make sure this number doesn't get any larger. They passed a bill yesterday, AB23, allowing workers laid off from small businesses with under 20 workers to apply for the same health insurance subsidy that workers in larger firms can to retain COBRA, as part of the federal stimulus package. Of course, that would impact 60,000 to 100,000 Californians, which is a drop in the bucket given these latest numbers.

Our broken health care system does not merely have an effect on the margins. A near-majority of Californians face this crisis in a very direct way. And with the recession only getting worse here, and slipping into Depression in some areas, something must be done as soon as possible to remedy this, both for fiscal reasons and reasons of basic humanity.

Health Care Now

Most Americans favor universal health care. It's a very simple fact that is not reflected in our political debates.

The poll finds that 49% of all Americans support a comprehensive government health care system to deal with all medical problems, while another 10% of those polled supported a limited government health care system geared toward emergencies. 32% of poll respondents thought that private enterprise should handle health care while the remaining 9% simply didn’t know.

The data was part of a larger polling project to measure the swings in American public opinion on a variety of issues today compared with 30 years ago. Back in a 1979 poll, 48% of Americans felt private enterprise should handle health care while only 28% thought that government should cover all problems and 12% thought the government should cover emergencies.

Health care is one of those issues that interfaces with every man, woman and child in the country. We all see doctors, we all know somebody who is sick. That is why the progressive position wins out, because the concept is bite-sized and accessible enough for everyone to understand it. During the current downturn, 14,000 people are losing their health care every single day. The stimulus package includes a big COBRA subsidy but it's not enough:

For instance, while the final compromise includes $87 billion in additional Medicaid funds to states over 27 months, a 65% subsidy to cover COBRA premiums for nine months, $19 billion for health information technology, $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research and $1 billion for prevention and wellness, negotiators considered Republican objections and stripped provisions that would have allowed workers “to stay on Cobra until they qualified for Medicare” or enroll in Medicaid if they can’t afford COBRA premiums “even with the new subsidies.

The economy will not recover without investment in health care that has a large front-end startup cost but a huge back-end savings. It is crippling both individuals and businesses that cannot shoulder the health care burden and compete. There must be comprehensive health care reform.