Staying Poor to Stay Alive

Sofia Vergara, a Los Angeles native now in her freshman year at UC Berkeley, would like to get a job in law after graduation. As Vergara recently explained to a state Assembly committee, however, a perverse California law may end up thwarting her dream.

Vergara, you see, has cerebral palsy and now receives Medi-Cal health benefits, such as a personal attendant who helps her bathe several times a week. The minute she transitions from starving student to hard-working taxpayer, Vergara will be dropped from Medi-Cal, which lets benefits flow only to California residents with less than $2,000 in assets and $650 in monthly income.

Vergara showed up at the Assembly hearing to lobby in favor of a humane and economically smart bill by Assemblywoman Dion Aroner (D-Berkeley) that would let severely disabled adults retain Medi-Cal benefits until their yearly incomes reached $75,000. AB 925 would also let recipients keep up to $80,000 in assets and would remove the so-called marriage penalty so that assets of a spouse did not spoil eligibility.

AB 925 passed the Assembly last month and may pass the full Senate by next month. However, in recent weeks some Republicans have been circulating an “oppose policy memo” arguing that AB 925 isn’t needed because nonprofit groups already help the disabled find work that offers adequate insurance.

That’s a lame argument. Nonprofits that help the disabled get work reach only a few thousand Californians and typically don’t offer much needed personal attendant services. Moreover, as a Kaiser Family Foundation study released last month documents, managed care cost-cutting has led most employer-sponsored health plans to stop offering the special health benefits that seriously disabled people need, from the in-home support that Vergara depends on to the portable respirators that help many paralyzed people breathe.

Legislators should realize that while AB 925 technically expands Medi-Cal, it is no welfare entitlement. On the contrary, the bill would save the state money by encouraging disabled workers to get off welfare disability, or SSI. AB 925 is also fiscally smart because it is designed to supplement, not replace, the private insurance that an employer might offer. Medi-Cal would offer benefits only as the “payer of last resort,” and only if Washington continued paying for the expansion, which was authorized through a law that Congress passed two years ago.

Helping people with severe disabilities--the blind, the deaf, the paralyzed and others--get the health coverage they need to contribute to society should be a clear-cut, fast-track priority for state leaders. Legislators should not allow the state to continue the outrage of requiring the severely disabled to stay impoverished to keep the health care they need to stay alive.