Dear [Legislator Title] [Legislator Last Name] --

 

As you know, on January 8, 2010, the Governor released his budget proposal for state fiscal year 2010-11. Unless the State receives an unlikely amount of federal funding, his unfathomable proposal would kick 1,041,100 children off the successful and affordable Healthy Families health coverage program and would forfeit more than $800 million in federal funds to save only $222 million in General Fund dollars. He also proposes to eliminate the health coverage of roughly 150,000 infants and potentially hundreds of thousands of additional children in low-income families by reducing Medi-Cal eligibility levels to the minimum allowed by federal law. As a ‘best-case scenario’ in which the federal government does provide our state with billions of dollars, the Governor still proposes to remove approximately 204,000 children from Healthy Families, increase premiums that some families pay, and eliminate vision benefits for children enrolled in the Program.

 

Furthermore, the Governor’s action demonstrates a complete reversal of all the hard work that the Legislature and Administration put into passage of AB 1422 (Bass / Coauthor Steinberg), which gained bipartisan support and that helped save children’s health at the end of 2009!

 

Moreover, with the passage of national health reform, California has every incentive to provide health coverage to its children. National health reform provides much needed protections to children and families as well as provides financial incentives to states for ensuring children get the health coverage they need and for which they are eligible. 

 

Between 2007 and 2009 alone, during the height of the “great recession,” the number of uninsured children in California increased from 1.1 to 1.5 million. For those children who may be eligible for Healthy Families and Medi-Cal, and for the roughly 4.5 million children who already rely on these two programs for their only source of affordable health coverage, it is absolutely critical that these two programs be preserved.

 

Insurance can literally mean life or death for children. A recent Johns Hopkins study found that children hospitalized without insurance had a 60% higher mortality rate than those with insurance.  If the Governor’s proposal moves forward, kids in California will die.

 

When children lack health coverage, there are real costs to the health care system and to California's future economy. Furthermore, Healthy Families and Medi-Cal receive $2 and $1 in federal funds for every $1 our state invests, respectively. What’s more, thanks to the federal health reform bill, beginning in 2015 we will draw down more than $7 for every $1 we invest in Healthy Families; that makes it critical that we maintain the Program until 2015, at which point we can draw down a windfall of new federal funds.

 

Investing in children's health simply makes sense. As you negotiate the state budget for fiscal year 2010-2011, we ask that you prioritize children’s health programs and support a budget that fully funds the State’s children’s health coverage programs, Medi-Cal and Healthy Families.

 

Sincerely,