Center in the News

In April of last year, the UC Berkeley Labor Center and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research released a report estimating that 3.2 million Californians would remain without health coverage in 2022. Separate research from the Public Policy Institute of California found that nearly half that number were immigrants, and of those a significant number were undocumented. Indeed, the Labor Center’s findings suggest that 1.27 million undocumented immigrants in California lack health coverage.

According to a study conducted jointly by the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, nearly two-thirds of undocumented immigrants under the age of 65 lack health insurance in California. This is staggering when compared to only 10% of all other Californians in the same age range.

A commentary written by Cathy Kennedy, president of the California Nurses Association, cites a UCLA CHPR policy brief, which found that more Black and Latino Californians self-rationed needed care due to cost or insurance barriers than for white Californians.

In 2016, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that about half of California adults either had prediabetes or were undiagnosed diabetics. Two years later, California reported a higher number of new diabetes cases than any other U.S. state, according to state data.

In 2020, one in seven Californians skipped, delayed, or cut back on care, 60 percent of them due to cost, the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found last September.

But the relationship of other countries to fee-for-service medicine is somewhat complicated, according to Thomas Rice, PhD, professor of health policy and management at the University of California Los Angeles Fielding School of Public Health. For example, he said in an email, "Canada is known for relying on fee-for-service, but in Ontario, the largest province, there is mainly a mix of capitation, salary, and P4P [pay for performance]-type payments." The Netherlands "combines capitation and fee-for-service with global payments for certain procedures, and a small amount of P4P," he said.

Our modeling, using the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM) model, suggests that in 2022 almost 300,000 Californians would newly get subsidies. This includes 151,000 Californians who would otherwise be enrolled in the individual market without subsidies who will now receive an average of $165 per person per month from the ARP in 2022.

As of 2020, more than 2.5 million Californians age 64 and under had no health insurance coverage, according to a study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

The report is based on an analysis of the center’s California Health Interview Survey from 2019 and 2020.