The California Legislature is considering a plan to establish a statewide marketplace for vision insurance that would be separate from but linked to Covered California.
AB 1877, by Assembly member Ken Cooley (D-Rancho Cordova), calls for the state to create a vision care access council that would contract with insurers to provide stand-alone coverage for vision care. The council and its processes would be modeled after the state’s new health insurance exchange and would seek to establish links to Covered California.
Now before the Senate Appropriatons Committee, the bill calls for funding for the new exchange to come from vision insurers, not the state.
We asked stakeholders about the pros and cons of Cooley’s proposal. We got responses from:
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