Countywide
Expanded Choice, the Deukmejian Administration’s controversial experiment in health-care delivery for San Diego’s poor, appeared dead after the two-house conference committee left it out of the $37-billion state budget that could be sent to the governor this week.
The administration, which had yielded to protests and involuntarily abandoned plans for the experiment in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles County, had sought to implement it for 150,000 Medi-Cal patients in San Diego County beginning Oct. 1.
Under the program, Medi-Cal recipients would get care through consortiums of service providers similar to pre-paid health care plans, or so-called health maintenance organizations, operated by private medical insurance groups.
But its elimination in the budget package to be considered by both houses of the Legislature this week probably signals the programs demise, at least for a year.
Get the L.A. Times Politics newsletter
Deeply reported insights into legislation, politics and policy from Sacramento, Washington and beyond. In your inbox three times per week.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
