Center in the News

Pilot efforts to improve care coordination for California Medi-Cal beneficiaries with historically poor health outcomes, including many individuals with serious mental illness, appear to have weathered the initial challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. A report released this month by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research states that by the end of 2020, specialty and primary care services for these populations had returned to pre-pandemic levels.

There are people who practice specialized medicine who are often discouraged by the fees that Medi-Cal pays from locating in places where Medi-Cal patients live or taking Medi-Cal patients on if they can avoid them,” Needleman said. “By raising the payments for lower income people, for those who historically have been...on Medi-Cal or those who've been uninsured, you create a more attractive environment for some people to go practice where they otherwise wouldn't have."

As of 2021, 94 percent of Californians had health insurance, according to a report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

But Nadereh Pourat, director of the Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said if CalCare is implemented well, it could be even more financially beneficial than the current system. A comprehensive system in which everyone is equally covered brings equality and simplicity, two attributes the current system does not offer.

“If you look at the big picture, if you get a product like CalCare that’s really comprehensive and covers everything, and you don’t have any cost sharing, why wouldn’t you go for a better product?” Pourat said.

According to Dylan Roby, PhD, an associate professor of health, society and behavior at the University of California Irvine Program in Public Health, the system would be built on a fee-for-service model, similar to Medicare.

Advocates have argued that the COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on gaps in care and the disparities based on race, ethnicity, income, and location.

A single-payer system would eliminate costly premiums, copays, and deductibles, which would help close gaps and expand access to care to all.

Roby, who has co-authored multiple analyses exploring the costs and potential

According to Fil-Am, Dr. Ninez Ponce of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, who has been tracking the progress made in insurance coverage over the last 20 years, there are still healthcare disparities within the AAPI community. "These are the people who are most at risk for being uninsured and for the 18 to 65 group, those that are working. So being healthy is really important. The uninsured rate has gone down dramatically for all races following the pattern of decline... but there's still room for all groups to get coverage," Ponce notes.

Ponce points out, "When you look within the

Dr. Ninez Ponce, director at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, a professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and the Principal Investigator for the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), has been tracking the progress made in health insurance coverage for over two decades. Dr. Ponce spoke about the health insurance and health care disparities in the AANHPI communities.

Two separate studies by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health researchers have been recognized among the top 10 articles in 2021 by the scientific journal Health Affairs.

The two UCLA Fielding School articles are:

“The Effect of the Affordable Care Act on Cancer Detection Among the Near-Elderly” with co-authors including Gerald Kominski, professor emeritus of health policy and management, and Srikanth Kadiyala, a senior economist in the Center for Health Policy Research. In this study, researchers showed that the increase in insurance coverage among adults ages 60–64 due to the Affordable

Nearly 3.2 million Californians, or about 9.5% of the population aged 0 to 64, will be uninsured in 2022, according to a study released last year by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Many of those are undocumented workers, a problem Newsom is trying to bridge in his latest proposed budget by expanding Medi-Cal coverage to those income eligible and between ages 26 and and 50, regardless of their immigration status.

"California is a big, diverse place. If you can make it work here, you can make it work anywhere," Jack Needleman, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at UCLA's Fielding School of Public Health, told ABC News.