Some important, unsolved, intractable issues in politics, particularly California politics, are just so complex that they boggle the mind, defy rational analysis toward a solution.
But this week I learned of an important California problem that has a truly simple political solution, one that is fully backed by literally every Republican and every Democrat in the Legislature. Yet when the legislators pass bills including that solution and send them to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk, he vetoes them, and has done so for eight years.
The issue is the effort to provide hearing aids for children who need them at crucial, very young ages so that they keep up developmentally with their siblings and peers. The way to do that is to require healthcare plans to cover children’s hearing aids the same way as they do other important medical solutions for growing infants. Thirty-five states have such mandates, including Texas, Georgia and Ohio.
But California won’t do it, because of Newsom’s vetoes, which it doesn’t take a political savant to see would seem to be related to the objections of my own healthcare provider, Kaiser, which doesn’t want to absorb the cost. And which, as it happens, has given nearly $100 million in grants for Newsom projects on homelessness, wildfires and COVID-19.
But there actually was a California agency allocated $30 million in recent years to get hearing aids, which cost around $6,000, to babies in the state who need them but whose families can’t afford them. That’s the good news. The very bad if unsurprising news is that the Hearing Aid Coverage for Children Program, HACCP, spent $23 million of that on administrative costs and managed to get fewer than 300 children hearing aids. Pretty dismal return on investment.
About 20,000 California children still need hearing aids. It wouldn’t get to them all, but I recently talked with Michelle Marciniak, the founder of a group called Let California Kids Hear, who says there is a fix that would allow the remaining $7 million to help about 16,000 kids get the devices they need.
Again, it’s simple: A proposal presented to Newsom now would require that the rest of the HACCP money be used solely for hearing aids.
Why does it matter so much? Marciniak’s group of volunteer moms lobbying Sacramento again puts it simply: Delays in obtaining hearing aids can directly affect speech, language, and literacy development.
Her involvement is personal. When her daughter Marie was in preschool, the teacher came to Michelle and said, “There’s something wrong. She’s starting to lose language skills.” So Michelle and her husband took Marie in for tests and found out she was hard of hearing after having a virus. They were lucky, and could afford the hearing aids. But they’d joined a support group for other parents with the same issue, and many moms there couldn’t pay the price. Several of them literally quit their jobs in desperation so that they would be income-eligible for help from Medi-Cal.
So Michelle and a cohort of moms founded Let California Kids Hear a decade ago, and formerly little Marie, now 15, became a key spokesperson for the group, addressing numerous legislative committee hearings in Sacramento, becoming a frequent flyer on Southwest.
“The governor has four kids so I thought, great,” Michelle told me. But the bureaucracy spent its money on bureaucracy, not hearing aids. Still, what if that last $7 million went just to the devices that are so needed? Simple, right?
Plus, the group still wants health plans to pay for kids’ hearing aids. But Newsom, in his May budget revision, took the latest effort to require that out of his proposal. “I don’t understand,” Michelle says. “He blamed it on Dr. Oz and (the federal) HHS. Everyone’s telling us to come back when there’s a new governor. We won’t accept that.” Because thousands of California kids don’t have the time for another delay.
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. lwilson@scng.com.