For 15 million Californians on Medi-Cal — including more than 1.3 million Bay Area residents in Contra Costa, Alameda and Santa Clara counties — a regular checkup or specialist visit can take months or longer to schedule. The unfortunate reality is that a health insurance card does not always guarantee access to the care that Medi-Cal patients need and deserve.
That’s why we strongly support Proposition 35 and urge voters to do the same.
Proposition 35 is essential to California’s health care delivery system because it will secure stable, ongoing funding for Medi-Cal — without raising taxes on individuals — and will dedicate these funds to protecting and expanding access to care for Medi-Cal patients and all Californians.
Medi-Cal provides health insurance for 50% of all children as well as low-income, senior and disabled persons. The program has expanded over the last decade to provide coverage for more Californians. Unfortunately, funding to ensure eligible patients have access to essential health care has not.
The result is that providers can no longer take on new patients, clinics and hospitals are forced to consolidate services, and wait times for specialty care can take months. At Asian Health Services, we provide our patients with whole-person care, addressing everything from physical to mental health and helping connect people to services in their community. But with so few specialty physicians who accept Medi-Cal, it’s often a significant challenge to refer our patients to a provider who can treat more complex conditions.
Proposition 35 will help solve this problem.
It provides dedicated funding for primary care, specialty care, emergency room care, mental health services, dental services, family planning, reproductive health and more, because this broad-based funding approach ensures that the greatest number of patients have improved access to care.
Proponents of the measure also understand the need for flexibility in areas of care outside the initiative, which is why Proposition 2 provides $2 billion in flexible funding to the state’s general fund for other health care services.
Over the last 15 years, California lawmakers have diverted a total of $30 billion in funding intended for Medi-Cal to programs unrelated to health care. As a result, Medi-Cal has been chronically underfunded, which has exacerbated a divide in how patients get access to care, depending on the kind of health coverage they have.
That’s why it’s time for voters to step in and take action.
The real-world impact of an ill-equipped Medi-Cal program is that the most vulnerable among us are waiting the longest for care or, worse, foregoing it all together and resorting to costly, time-consuming visits in the emergency room that impact our whole region.
In order to reduce unnecessary emergency visits, more preventative and primary health care needs to be available for patients. That’s where Proposition. 35 helps.
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For community clinics like us, who serve tens of thousands of patients a year regardless of income, immigration status or language and cultural barriers, Proposition. 35 will provide the resources we need to hire more staff, expand our hours, build out the network of community health care workers to educate and connect people to the care they need, and allow us to offer more whole-person services.
A broad and diverse network of community clinics, Planned Parenthood, doctors, health care workers, dentists, emergency responders, hospitals, business groups, social justice organizations and hundreds of others support Proposition 35.
Proposition 35 also contains strong accountability requirements to ensure 99% of the revenue is actually spent on patient care by capping administrative expenses at 1%. The measure requires independent performance audits to ensure funds are spent effectively and as intended. Vote yes on Proposition 35.
Julia Liou is CEO of Asian Health Services, with 13 community clinics across the East Bay.