Los Angeles Times Urges ‘Action’ on Plans to Provide Coverage to the Uninsured
With seven million Californians lacking health coverage, the "possible solutions" under consideration "shouldn't be shelved without action," according to a Los Angeles Times editorial. Health officials are expected to submit several proposals to state lawmakers next month, and the Times calls on elected officials to "resist the easy path of clucking sympathetically and then leaving the [proposals] to gather dust." Some of the proposals call for "major overhauls that would provide universal coverage under a single-payer system." One plan, already introduced in the Legislature as AB 32, would expand Healthy Families and Medi-Cal coverage, while another would provide incentives to encourage small businesses to offer insurance coverage. Reforming the system "is going to cost money, but not fixing it also has costs," the editorial says, noting that hospitals with "already strained profit margins" are being forced to absorb the cost of treating the uninsured and that emergency rooms are closing, putting the "insured and uninsured alike at risk." The Times concludes, "We don't know which proposal or which combination of these [plans] would work best. What we do know is that California can do better than leaving millions of working-poor families without health care coverage" (Los Angeles Times, 4/16).
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