Home Expanding Coverage

Fostering a New Debate for Health Care Reform
Organizing for the Vision of Universal Health Care
Secure and Expand Employer Based Coverage
Supporting Expansion of Public Insurance Programs to Insure All Children
Oppose Shifting the Costs and Burden to Individuals

Expand coverage by securing and building on what works in the employer-provided and public health insurance systems.

Background

Reform proposals currently under consideration in the Legislature typically increase health care financing to insure more people, while preserving the current networks of independent private doctors and medical groups, public and private hospitals, clinics, and other medical providers, both public and private.

New proposals should build on the public insurance programs and employer-based systems that work, and continue to group people together to share risk. Proposals should advance the goal of bringing people together, rather than further segmenting the insurance market, or further making health coverage an individual burden rather than a shared social responsibility. Individual citizens should have both rights and responsibilities in our health system, but making those real only works in the context of social insurance system.

Recommended Actions

A. Support new versions of SB 2/Proposition 72 to secure the employer-based coverage on which 19 million Californians rely, and to extend it to some or all of the 80% of the uninsured that are in working families. Work to ensure that there is a level playing field between the majority of employers that provide good health benefits, and those that do not provide coverage to all their workers, and thus rely on taxpayers to fund the health care of their workers.

B. Support the long-delayed Healthy Families parent expansion so that 300,000 lower-income parents (that are between 100% and 200% of the federal poverty level) can obtain health coverage and we can insure more children.

C. Support an expansion of public insurance programs to insure all children, by expanding the eligibility criteria for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families, as proposed in AB772 (Chan) and SB437 (Escutia). Reform the outreach, enrollment and retention processes of these programs to be streamlined and smarter, and work to encourage employers to keep and expand dependent coverage for their workers’ children.

D. Organize for the vision of universal health care, supporting SB 840 (Kuehl). If we are stronger and healthier the more people are pooled together and covered, then we are strongest and healthiest under a universal “single-payer” system. By removing the confusing and dizzying amounts of paperwork and the middlemen of insurance companies, a Medicare-for-all system, compared to our current system, would yield substantial savings, cover more people, and allow us to make better, more democratic choices about our health care system.

E. Oppose “individual mandate” proposals, like AB1670 (Nation/Richman), that start from the wrong premise that the uninsured lack insurance by choice; that would criminalize the seeking of care for the uninsured; that lack subsidies and other mechanisms to make such coverage affordable for all; that don’t protect the privacy of Californians; and that lack proper reforms of the individual insurance market, so that insurers cannot deny coverage because of “pre-existing conditions” or price discriminate because of age, gender, illness, or geography.

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