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Tag: Medi-Cal

Who Knew? California May Have a Public Option

During the health reform debate, there was controversy and disappointment over the failure to include a public option in the Affordable Care Act. Not only did the public option idea not die, it is alive and well in California.

In northern California last week, Kaiser Health News correspondent Sarah Varney interviewed the CEO of the Alameda Alliance for Health, Ingrid Lamirault, about their intention to participate in the California Health Benefit Exchange when it goes live in 2014. The Alameda Alliance is a non-profit insurer (governed locally) that competes with private for-profit plans in the county to deliver health services to Medicaid beneficiaries (called “Medi-Cal”) and public employees.

California does not have a monolithic or centralized Medicaid program. There are a variety of innovative programs that deliver cost-effective high quality care to Medi-Cal beneficiaries. Alameda Alliance is one of fourteen “two plan” counties that serve 3 million beneficiaries. Alameda has to market to Medi-Cal members in competition with a commercial plan. These public plans have been competing with the private sector for over a decade, and despite initial concern from both the left and the right, Medi-Cal beneficiaries and providers are pretty satisfied with the program, which has been able to live within its budgetary limits.

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Could California Become a Model for the Single Payer Movement?

With concern rising that a Republican alternative to Obamacare could fail to adequately cover pre-existing conditions (“Eight billion won’t even begin to cover it,” one Washington insider told THCB late this week) and will likely sharply cut benefits for Medicaid recipients, a number of states  are preparing contingency plans.  Some are preparing legal challenges. In California, progressives are once again laying the groundwork for a single payer system.

Could it happen? And could California serve as a model for other states?

California, the largest state in the union by population and the world’s sixth-largest economy, has good reason to push public policy in the opposite direction.

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