Why Create Paperwork Mazes for the Needy?

With a small exception in a pink Barbie nightgown, it could be said that Bobbi-jo Bergeron has learned life’s rules. The 17-year-old is nice to her parents. She has a 3.9 grade point average. Her teachers like her. She has a career goal--physical therapist--and plans for college. She works at a Del Taco after school.

But there is that exception, a pixie-faced daughter born two years and a lifetime ago when Bobbi-jo Bergeron was 15 and lost and foolishly desperate to be someone and fit in somewhere. Since then, the most constant difficulty in the teen mother’s life has been with the rules that ought to be simplest: those for insuring her child’s health under Medi-Cal.

“Every year, you fill out all this paperwork,” sighs the girl in her red Del Taco sweatshirt, trailing her toddler around her parents’ Whittier living room. “A big packet once a year, and then quarterly reports. They ask what work you do, and what about the absentee parent--who in my case, dropped out of school and left the state--and if I have a car, and what are my assets, and how much my parents pay for rent. And if my dad makes any extra money, I have to include my pay stub and his pay stub. And like, mix line A and line B, and take this total and put it down here. And if you make one mistake? That’s it. They cut off your baby’s Medi-Cal.”

This would be one thing if Bobbi-jo Bergeron were a convicted con artist, but, like most of us, she’s just a person, muddling through. Not so pure that she didn’t rush into pregnancy as a way to feel more worthy, but not so feckless that motherhood hasn’t made her better and wiser. (“Everybody makes mistakes,” she says. “It’s how you fix them that counts.”)

In fact, she wouldn’t be dealing with the system at all, except that her father’s insurance--he’s a mechanic--only covered her, and not her child. When she applied to Medi-Cal for her child’s insurance, the caseworker urged her to get it for herself too, since she met the criteria. She refused. Asking taxpayers for anything beyond coverage for her baby, she says, “would have been irresponsible.”

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Now, arguably, anyone grown-up enough to bring a child into the world should be grown-up enough to wake up and smell the paperwork. But there’s paperwork and then there’s Medi-Cal paperwork, which is among the most cumbersome of its kind in the nation, thanks to intermittent public paranoia and wedge politics.

“It’s horrendous,” says Lynn Kersey of Maternal and Child Health Access in Los Angeles, a nonprofit that, among other things, helps parents apply for Medi-Cal. “We see people who, if we help them, think we walk on water. I’ve gotten notes, letters, gifts. It’s ridiculous. A person applying for health insurance shouldn’t require a professional advocate.”

But the situation fits this state’s ambivalence about entitlements in general and its strange, miserly terror of need. On one hand, there are huge federal incentives for states to insure children; on the other, there’s huge political mileage in painting all Medi-Cal recipients as scammers. California has spent millions to track down and enroll people in Medi-Cal--and its companion program, Healthy Families, which insures the children of working poor people--only to make the forms so opaque that applicants throw up their hands.

The Medi-Cal people are aware of this problem, and have agreed to some streamlining, but legislation that would actually fix things faces an uncertain fate. It takes nerve, after all, to suggest that there’s something wrong with a system that is motivated, in the words of one sponsor, Baldwin Park Assemblyman Martin Gallegos, “by a presumption of fraud rather than a presumption of need.”

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This is what Bobbi-jo Bergeron finds perhaps most offensive. “They probably have every right to judge me, but they don’t even look at the person,” the teenager says. “They just treat everyone like deadbeats. All I want is for my baby to be healthy until I can get a job with benefits.”

Last month, in fact--in an incident that she turned into a school paper--her child’s Medi-Cal was nearly cut off because she couldn’t decipher some paperwork and her eligibility worker only took questions from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m., when the teenager was in school. (“I didn’t know if I was the applicant or co-applicant or beneficiary. . . .”) Only last-minute scrambling got matters resolved.

Trust isn’t easy. Scams do abound. Myths about the “nobility” of have-nots notwithstanding, anyone who’s ever lined up for food stamps knows that not-having doesn’t make you nicer; it demoralizes and demeans. But it’s hard to believe the solution is in rules that give with one hand and take away with the other, thus ruling out the public’s responsibility.

Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.