About 700,000 adults between ages 26 and 49 will be eligible as of Jan. 1
California will welcome the new year by becoming the first state to offer health insurance for all undocumented immigrants.
Starting Jan. 1, all undocumented immigrants, regardless of age, will qualify for Medi-Cal, California’s version of the federal Medicaid program for people with low incomes.
Previously, undocumented immigrants were not qualified to receive comprehensive health insurance but were allowed to receive emergency and pregnancy-related services under Medi-Cal as long as they met eligibility requirements, including income limits and California residency in 2014.
At least one conservative probably had a literal aneurism when they heard this.
Wouldn’t they be glad undocumented immigrants would be more likely to live in California and less likely to live in their state?
wow thank god something good happened for that undocumented immigrant because…
No.
There’s conservatives in California too. Just not enough to win most of their major elections.
CA sends some notable conservatives to Congress. Kevin McCarthy for example.
California is like 1/3 Republicans
One can hope.
Good.
One less to worry about.
Probably means Texas won’t be sending their refugees to California.
This headline is some absolute bullshit.
California already had health insurance for undocumented immigrants, as does Massachusetts. It’s just limited to emergency care and pregnancy care.
California is expanding their existing coverage to comprehensive health care including primary care, which is cheaper than letting medical conditions get so completely out of control that they require expensive and disabling emergency hospitalizations.
Well, that’s all what the article says, it just doesn’t fit in the headline. It does identify that the eligibility criteria are removed by specifying all.
I mean, it’s also just nice to keep people healthy as well. Medical care should not cost a thing.
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What a wonderful healthcare system the US has. Jeez.
That’s exactly what the article said
For us non-US readers; what’s the difference between health insurance and healthcare? For comparison, in Australia private health gives you a room, nice TV, edible food etc but you don’t get priority. When it comes to essential surgery or treatment you join the line with everyone else.
Health insurance is the system we use to pay for healthcare. Insurance is made available by your employer, you then pay premiums in order to buy and keep your insurance, and once you actually need healthcare, your insurance helps cover some of the costs of receiving care.
Everyone in the states needs health insurance, not because of how affordable it makes taking care of emergencies, but because, if you don’t have insurance, you have to pay the prices that the medical provider and insurance companies made up on how much procedures cost, so they can give each other a discount on those insane prices.
For instance, if you have insurance in the states and you go to the hospital for a nasty fall that maybe broke something. Nothing was broken, but they had to take x-rays. Well, you have to pay for the x-rays, and the time that the staff was needed for you. We’re going to pretend, for this case, that your insurance won’t deny coverage since it “wasn’t medically necessary”. So you’d get a bill between $200-$300.
But if you didn’t have insurance, or were denied coverage, you have to pay full price. But that price isn’t the price that anyone actually pays unless they’re in your predicament. You see, the provider and insurance had gotten together to determine how much would be paid for any given procedure, but they make the deal seem much better to their respective bosses by inflating the price of the procedure before negotiations, so that the insurance pays a “discount” that’s similar to the actual cost of the procedure. Which is great for them, but if you get treatment without insurance (or your insurance denies coverage) you have to pay the fake, inflated price that the provider said it cost before they negotiated the price back down to something reasonable with the insurance companies. So, to go back to my example above, those x-rays and some time with staff that didn’t lead anywhere will probably cost you more in the neighborhood of $2000-$3000 if you aren’t covered.
This has a double cooling effect. One, it forces more people to have health insurance out of fear of paying those stupidly insane prices. And two, it makes people avoid going to the doctor for minor issues for fear of being denied coverage since “it wasn’t medically necessary”. Great for profitability, terrible for humans.
Let’s not forget that the premium is usually taken from your paycheck, and can range from $15-$750/pay cycle depending on the insurance plan. In my case, I’m paying $450/month as the premium, plus $90/visit. The healthcare system doesn’t have an office near my home, so I travel an hour and a half to see the doctor, and it’s 45 minutes to the nearest hospital.
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For reference, I was in a car accident that broke both of my wrists and I had to go to the ER. I was fine other than my wrists.
The ER use for about… 3 hours? Was over $10,000. Because my health insurance refused coverage since it was in an auto accident.
Luckily my bodily injury coverage on my insurance paid.
Then I needed surgery and physical therapy. All of which were not covered by my health insurance.
The surgery was about $32,000. (Included the metal plates and screws/pins as well as the surgical room and recovery + surgeon and anesthesia).
All said and done total cost for having my wrists broken was about $70,000. None of which was covered by my health insurance and thank god my parents (I was still on their car insurance) paid for underinsured motorist coverage because the drunk that caused the accident didn’t have insurance. I didn’t go into debt ONLY because of that coverage.
They charged me $40 for 2 Tylenol they gave me in the ER while I waited for them to come set my wrists and give me the big girl pain killers. $18 for a pregnancy test too prior to surgery that I couldn’t refuse. Unreal.
The crazy thing is that now, with high deductible plans being the norm, having access to your insurer’s PRICES is now a significant part of the benefit.
For any not familiar with high deductible plans, essentially you pay the full cost of the first several thousand dollars you incur per year, before insurance starts to cover any of your costs. But you get to pay the insurance company’s rates instead of the fake retail price.
Emergency rooms are required to try and stabilize patients before they discharge them. These patients are billed after they leave the hospital, insured or not.
If I try to schedule a checkup or procedure, I need to give my insurance card first. Uninsured can pay for a flat fee upfront. If they can’t pay, they get no service.
With insurance, things get complicated. The facility will try to give you an estimated cost of the service. But it’s always a back and forth with 2 or 3 parties; the insurance, facility, and doctor network. If there is a disagreement between parties, you the patient get a bigger bill. Even when you payed for the procedure beforehand.
It’s even more fun when, for example, a scan is covered but the person reading the results is not. Or a surgeon and surgery is covered, but the anesthesiologist is not. Or your usual ob/gyn isn’t working when you go into labor at 2am on a Sunday.
Yea, I fucking hate bill balancing. We received a $10,000 bill for a neonatal consult a day after my son was born. He had a little fluid in his lungs, was gone in an hour or two.
The doctor was part of the hospital system but I guess that 2 miles he drove to the women’s center justifies a $10k bill. Our healthcare is broken.
It’s complicated and shitty, but people are treated the same for the most part, there’s no “fast pass” for having better insurance. Hospital and doctors offices are private. You can have private health issues, or if you qualify because you are poor or disabled you can get free health insurance from some states which then pays the hospital or doctor for your care. If you have your own private health insurance through a work group plan or you pay for yourself then you might have to pay a percentage of the total cost called a “copay” or you might have to pay the total cost until you have paid a yearly deductible and then you will only pay a percentage of the total cost until you reach an “out of pocket maximum” for the year which can range from a few thousand to ten thousand or more dollars.
Health insurance implies a middleman that is profit driven to get as much money as possible by denying fringe claims, healthcare is paid for by all and has your health as its driving force.
This is a good first step and the only real issue is that this doesn’t go quite far enough.
We need Medi-Cal for all in this state.
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My family doesn’t particularly support undocumented citizens. I’m on the fence about it. Yeah, they also pay taxes, work like normal people, and probably fled for better living conditions. I would like to hope they be more well supported given they were documented. Additionally, it isn’t fair to the people who waited many years and paid lots of money to get through the process legitimately. So yeah, I would like to see immigrants formally go through the process, but if they can’t wait and pay like others, then they probably have a good reason behind their choices.
That’s insane.
What’s insane is how California can provide medical care to illegal immigrants but red states can’t even provide it for their citizens.
Kind of put things into perspective where’s the better place to live. That’s why California is so expensive while places like Oklahoma are not.
Supply and demand, lol.
What’s insane about it? Undocumented immigrants deserve healthcare too, and we should all expect public healthcare in a general sense.
Dude confused “amazing” with “insane.”
This is just good cost saving. Everyone has healthcare in the US. It’s called the emergency room. It costs 100x what healtchare should and has terrible outcomes compared to early preventive treatment, and is a terrible experience for the patient to boot.
Getting any group of people on preventive care is just smart in general, regardless of who they are.
He’s one of those “people are more human if they come from my country” folks.
Probably thinks people are more human if they share his skin color, too.
One looks through their comment history says otherwise. It just easier to demonize someone you don’t agree with.
Also I agree with them. Just saying its ass backwards that an illegal immigrant has better healthcare than an actually citizen doesn’t automatically mean illegal immigrants should have no healthcare
It’s not better. Now they simply qualify for the same program every other California resident can have.
… as a Californian this is bullshit. Solve mental health and homelessness crisis. This is smoke and mirrors shit. Gavin is all about image and little on substance. This coming from a person who wouldn’t vote Republican either. We are literally in the darkest timeline. A turd sandwich versus a douche
Yeah “solve mental health” but no health insurance for those poors! Great idea!
Any other cliche TV quotes you want to throw out?
The point was we need to take care of citizens first and we haven’t even done that. That’s the first order of government. I guess one could argue that giving everyone people who are not here legally services are protecting the public. Anyway, I was trashed last night so sorry for the rant but I still feel that the government isn’t doing all its can for its citizens first.
I’m a caretaker for someone with schizophrenia and the mental health services and coverage available in this state is completely inadequate. So politicians go on stage and say things like we’re going to give everyone healthcare and it is all shit.
Yeah you didn’t say that the state isn’t doing all it can though. You said to solve mental health and homelessness before giving health care to people.
If the person you are a caretaker for was undocumented, would you withhold care? Should they get less care? Should they just get shipped back to where they came from? Or should they get the best possible care, regardless of immigration status, because they are a person in need?
good they get help but what about the people living here already that have been waiting
Medi-Cal is already available to all Californians that meet income requirements?
You fucking know that those income requirements are ridiculous. I had 3k a month income. In the SF bay area - rent had just been raised by $200 pushing the cost above my income.
I qualified for like $200 a month in subsidies, no medi cal. Considering in copays and coinsurance, I couldn’t pay less than 1k for insurance.
So the choice was - homelessness or leave my illness untreated? Answer: leave the fucking country, death to lying Gavin Newsom.
Completely agree, but that wasn’t the question. Progress is progress, even if it’s decades late and only a tenth of what it should be.
That would be Socialism
Which is good
Your point?
Still mad about the time my income was equal to rent plus like $500 so I didn’t qualify for medi-cal. With my health conditions, on the cheapest plan, $1000+ a month. Fucking california, garbage place.
I feel like you are mad at the wrong organisation.
So you’re saying that high prices of rent and health insurance are not the responsibility of the regulatory framework that was explicitly designed for profit maximization?
I don’t know of a state that really regulates rent and health insurance. You’d see similar expenses in basically all expensive regions of the US.
What are building height limits if not a device to artificially reduce housing supply?
And yes it is the same everywhere in the US, that’s why I left the US
Good thing California is one of the few states trying to fix zoning.
Lmao zoning in California has only gotten worse over the past 10 years. 90% of houses in the SF bay area are on lots so small it’d be illegal to build them these days.
Yeah, it wasn’t enough to have building height limits, now they have lot size minimums for single family homes. Because god forbid someone live in an apartment in a walkable neighborhood
“Undocumented”? “health insurance”?
“Undocumented health insurance”!?
“as long as they met eligibility requirements, including income limits and California residency in 2014.”
But not documented!?Are you quite sure you’re all right over there?
Think of undocumented as “The Gov’t does not have a officially documented reason for why they are currently in the country” and not “The Gov’t literally has no idea that this person exists.”
You’re misunderstanding jargon for a standard english word.
“Undocumented” in US immigration terms is not the same meaning as being “undocumented” in other contexts, i.e lacking any and all documents of a specific type.
You can be “undocumented” inimmigration terms and still have establishing documents like power bills that show Californian residency.
I think California also issues driver licenses regardless of immigration status, just ability to pass a driving test. That’s likely the most common document that will be used for eligibility.
i don’t understand who arethe documetns?
it’s all just papperwork, right?
who makes the linews?
i don’t understand who arethe documetns? it’s all just papperwork, right? who makes the linews?
You ok bud?
He made the linews
