Salt in California’s Wounds

The plight of working families without health insurance is a national disgrace, and California has a percentage of uninsured workers among the country’s highest. Any reasonable plan to bring more of them into the fold should be welcomed in Washington. In his radio address Saturday, President Bush acknowledged the crisis and proposed solving it with a “new initiative to expand health insurance for the uninsured.” He promised he would “act ... quickly” to approve state “programs to broaden coverage for low-income Americans.” One big problem: He left out California.

It’s not that California hasn’t done its homework. One of the most promising and generous provisions in the lean state budget that Gov. Gray Davis signed into law two weeks ago is an $820-million set-aside for expanding Healthy Families, the state’s health insurance program for children in families earning less than twice the federal poverty level.

The expansion funds would be matched from a $40-billion pot that Congress established in 1997 for programs designed by the states to expand health coverage for their working poor. All that is needed is for Bush to give the OK.

However, the Bush administration has refused to even formally respond to California’s request of last December to use a share of the funds to cover parents in low-income working families too. Davis officials, speaking on background Monday, said Dennis Smith, federal director of state Medicaid programs, has not even explained why the California request is being delayed. He was quoted as saying, “No one has told me to change my position yet.”

The Bush administration has, however, approved plans submitted by two Republican governors, New York’s George Pataki and New Jersey’s Donald T. DiFrancesco. In his radio address, Bush ground salt into California’s wounds, holding up the Pataki plan as a national model. California’s plan is similar in all the essentials.

Bush should recognize that California’s increasingly dire health care woes affect Republicans, Democrats and independents alike. Despite the enrollment of 400,000 children in Healthy Families since Davis took office, the state still has the fourth-highest rate of uninsured people in the nation--22%, well above the national average of 17%. The costs of treating all those uninsured people have bled dry many emergency rooms and hospitals. Los Angeles is particularly hard-hit.

Expanding Healthy Families is at least a partial solution to the crisis. President Bush could have no reason beyond partisan politics to block California’s compassionate and well-crafted plan.