Healthy Families

By the time 4-year-old Juan Carlos visited a dentist, his teeth were decayed and he cried from the pain of his gum infection. He needed immediate care and two teeth were eventually extracted. His mother thought that she had enrolled him in a government-assisted health insurance program that would cover the costs. But like other poor and recent immigrants, she discovered too late that she had been victimized. Months earlier, she had called a toll-free number that she read on a flier.

In 1954, Dr. Jonas Salk had a new polio vaccine. It was expensive, but it worked. So how did our parents' medical system distribute this miracle drug to America's children? Simple: We walked over to the school cafeteria in a terrified huddle and got poked by needles that looked about 3 feet long. We didn't fill out a five-page form, prove we were born here, produce documents, line up for interviews, come up with $200 per year. Why? Because our health was involved, and we were their children.

With reforms enacted last year, California has an unprecedented opportunity to fill gaping holes in children's health insurance coverage--but the state must do a far better job reaching out to families, especially the working poor, according to a UCLA report being released today. Medi-Cal expansion and the new Healthy Families program have the potential to insure two-thirds of the state's 1.

GOV. ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER may have a hard time persuading the Democratic leaders of the Legislature to accept his apparent return to centrism, despite his recent backing of a raise in the minimum wage, elimination of a fee increase at state universities, higher school spending and legalization of prescription drug purchases from other nations where commonly used drugs are cheaper.

It is a convention of the "gotcha" media that if there's a problem, the politicians not only won't fix it, but will make a bigger mess. This is only half-true. Actually, the government's success rate is about the same as for any cross-section of evolving humans. Case in point: California's good-news-bad-news evolution on the matter of health insurance for kids. Good news first.

Doctors, patients, consultants, parents--just about everyone connected with California's health care industry likes the idea behind Healthy Families, a new program designed to make health insurance affordable for children of low-income workers. That unanimous approval crumbles, however, when talk turns to the details.

Now comes the children's hour. California is beginning the biggest expansion of public health insurance programs since Medi-Cal was created a generation ago. Working families of modest incomes without health insurance for their children became eligible July 1 for a new state program offering coverage for doctor visits, hospital care and prescription drugs. The Healthy Families program aims at finding and covering many of the 400,000 uninsured children in the state.

The plight of working families without health insurance is a national disgrace, and California has a percentage of uninsured workers among the country's highest. Any reasonable plan to bring more of them into the fold should be welcomed in Washington. In his radio address Saturday, President Bush acknowledged the crisis and proposed solving it with a "new initiative to expand health insurance for the uninsured." He promised he would "act ...

As soon as Saturday, 41 states may lose nearly $2 billion that Congress gave them amid much fanfare in 1997 to provide health insurance to children of working-poor families. The biggest loser could be California, which is slated to return the unspent portion of its first-year allocation--a whopping $597 million. In Sacramento, the blame game has already begun. Staffers of Gov. Gray Davis rightly fault former Gov.

A coalition of low-income gambling employees, union leaders and clergy protested the lack of affordable family insurance Tuesday at the Spa and Agua Caliente Casinos, run by one of the state's most prosperous Indian tribes. The event was part of an ongoing effort by the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union to organize workers at the two Coachella Valley casinos operated by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians.