Health Insurance
The recent Gallup Poll on California’s Latino population and its difficulties in getting adequate medical care again points up an unhappy fact about today’s California: More than 5 million Californians, Latinos and others, don’t have health insurance and are therefore less able than the rest of us to get adequate medical care.
Some 40% of the respondents said at least one member of their families did not have health insurance; one out of four said they were insured by Medi-Cal, but 21% of those had difficulty finding a physician willing to treat Medi-Cal patients.
The California Medical Assn. is proposing an Affordable Basic Care (ABC) plan that offers the most realistic and pragmatic way of addressing the problem. ABC would reform the health insurance industry, extend health insurance to most workers who are now uninsured and shore up the state’s safety net of public facilities. If the Legislature fails to act on the problem this year, the CMA and others are prepared to offer ABC as a ballot initiative in 1992. The problem must be solved. ABC would do it without breaking the backs of taxpayers.
HOWARD L. LANG, MD
President, CMA
San Francisco
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