How’s The Golden State Doing?
Health Insurance In California

When you do a Web search on “Health Insurance in California”, it’s no surprise that many of the sites that pop up are those for individual insurance companies or Web sites that provide quick quotes from several companies for the potential customer. However, buried among all those quote offers is a lengthy document called the “The State of Health Insurance in California: Findings from the 2003 California Health Interview Survey” compiled by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, funded by grants from the California Endowment and the California Wellness Foundation, and published in 2005.

The survey talks about the state’s high uninsured rate and how it pertains to California’s low-income families, minorities, children, and young adults. Among California’s nonelderly population, nearly 6.6 million lacked health insurance coverage for all or part of 2003. That’s more than the entire population of Massachusetts.

The survey also explores employment-based health insurance coverage including how employment-based health insurance coverage of dependents fell in 2003 and the continued erosion of employment-based health insurance in California even though the nonelderly population depends heavily on it. One section of the report covers the growth in the number of Californians covered by the Medi-Cal and Healthy Families health insurance programs because of the loss of employer-provided health insurance. The loss of employment-based insurance hit the lower income families the hardest as they were the ones more likely to lose that type of health insurance coverage. Race is also an issue when looking at uninsured rates. Nonelderly Latinos and American Indian/Alaska Natives reported the highest rates of uninsurance and the lowest rates of employer-based health insurance in California. Sadly, the trend of erosion of employment-based health insurance coverage is expected to continue in the years to come.

When employer-based health insurance coverage isn’t available or sufficient, the other main option is private insurance. But the cost of privately purchased insurance is a big reason why so many Californians are uninsured. Forth-three percent of the survey respondents stated that the reason they didn’t have insurance was because they couldn’t afford it.

Access to health insurance coverage is also addressed in the survey results, in particular delays in obtaining care, preventive cancer screening, use of medications for chronic illnesses and perceived racial discrimination. The end of the report includes 41 exhibits showing everything from California and National Rates of Uninsurance to Family Work Status Among Current Medi-Cal and Health Families Enrollees.