Economic Boom Shrinks California's Health Insurance Gap; Residents Without Job-based Insurance Left Behind

Date: Februrary 8, 2001

• Medi-Cal (California's Medicaid program) and the new Healthy Families Program (California's version of the State Children's Health Insurance Program) covered 10.5 percent of nonelderly Californians in 1999, down from 11 percent in 1998 — a slower rate of decline than in recent years.
• An estimated 685,000 nonelderly adults are uninsured but eligible for Medi-Cal coverage. An additional 3.1 million uninsured adults are citizens or legal immigrants who do not qualify.
• In 2000, Gov. Gray Davis and the state Legislature agreed to seek a federal waiver to extend the Healthy Families Program to some uninsured parents whose family incomes or assets exceed the eligibility limit for Medi-Cal. Davis has proposed capping parents' income eligibilty at 200 percent of the federal poverty level, well below the level of their children. At that income level, the proposed expansion could benefit up to 412,000 uninsured parents but still exclude 835,000 uninsured parents who are citizens or legal immigrants.
• If the income eligibility level were set at 250 percent of the poverty level, the same as for their children, 518,000 uninsured parents would be eligible for Healthy Families, reducing the number without coverage options to 729,000.

• UCLA School of Public Health: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/
• UCLA Center for Health Policy Research:http://www.healthpolicy.ucla.edu/
• Healthy Families Program: http://www.healthyfamilies.ca.gov/