Health care spending will outpace the nation’s overall economic growth over the next decade, the government forecast on Tuesday, highlighting a challenge for the next president, not to mention taxpayers, businesses and individual Americans.
Medi-Cal has expanded rapidly in recent years, largely due to California’s successful implementation of federal health care reform, and the program now provides affordable health care coverage to more than 12 million Californians with low or moderate incomes. The following discussion provides a more accurate and balanced perspective on the impact — and significance — of rising Medi-Cal enrollment under health care reform, a process that began with the passage of the federal Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010 and fully took effect in California in 2014.
The company would be based in St. Louis. That would make Health Net the latest of several companies whose corporate headquarters have left Southern California.
Prompted by complaints like Hill’s, the California state auditor last year began evaluating how the state oversees much of its health program for low-income residents. The resulting audit released Tuesday found that provider directories were riddled with errors and that the state Department of Health Care Services hadn’t properly regulated plans to guarantee patients adequate access to doctors.
Doctors and patients are telling these kinds of stories more often as state Medi-Cal rolls have increased by 4 million under an expansion program created by the Affordable Care Act. Today, more than 12 million Californians, nearly one-third of the state’s total population, are enrolled in the government’s health insurance plan for low-income, disabled and disadvantaged residents.