by Rebekah Gordon, Special to Stateline.org
Los Angeles – Dr. Edward Newton doesn’t bother wondering whether his patients in the emergency room at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center have health insurance. He just assumes they all don’t.
About 90 percent of the 400 patients who come through the emergency-room doors here each day are uninsured, according to Newton. Many come with inflamed chronic conditions like diabetes that they can’t keep under control for lack of access to primary, preventative care. All the emergency room can do is stabilize them, provide short-term treatment and send them on their way. Those needing admittance wait hours for a dwindling number of hospital beds.
One of the biggest and busiest teaching hospitals in the nation, County-USC in many respects is ground zero for the state’s health-care coverage crisis.
California has 6.6 million uninsured – more than any state – and a third of those reside in Los Angeles County, according to the California HealthCare Foundation, a nonprofit group that studies the state’s health-care delivery and financing. A trendsetting state on issues from cleaning up smog to banning toxic plastics in toys, California now could become a prime test bed for universal health care.
Much like Massachusetts, which last year was the first state to pass legislation making health insurance a legal requirement, California has a high-profile Republican governor working alongside a Democratic-controlled Legislature to solve the problem of the state’s uninsured. But in California, the stakes are even higher than they were in Massachusetts: 12 times the number of uninsured, 14 percent more poverty, eight times the cost, and an exponentially greater potential to be a model for other states or the nation.
The sheer size of California and its volume of uninsured – who outnumber the entire population of Massachusetts – plus the state’s and governor’s political clout could help rev up the momentum for health-reform discussion at the national level, said Drew Altman, head of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit group that conducts national health-policy research. Health care already is emerging as a major issue in the 2008 presidential election.
“The possibility of something passing in California and the reality of something having passed in Massachusetts is just sending the message nationally that it’s possible to break through the paralysis which has prevented anything from getting done in Washington,” Altman said. “On the other hand, if (California lawmakers) falter, it will take some wind out of the sails of the national movement.”
A special legislative session on health-care reform was called in September by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), and negotiations appeared deadlocked for weeks. However, a compromise from Democrats announced Nov. 6 appears to have infused new life into the quest for a deal. The Democrats’ proposal was approved last week on a party-line vote by the Assembly’s Committee on Health.
