This blog post examines the extraordinary growth in job-based health care costs, how this impacts California workers, and what the state can do to mitigate the problem. We focus on costs for family coverage, though a similar story could be told about the cost of single coverage.

UC Berkeley Labor Center researchers Miranda Dietz, Laurel Lucia, Alexis Manzanilla, and Nari Rhee have analyzed the potential impacts of Medicaid cuts on California and the importance of the Medi-Cal program to our state. View their recent publications.

Rolling back Medicaid access through cuts and bureaucratic hurdles will have far-reaching and disproportionate impacts on older adults. In particular, the work documentation requirement poses an especially draconian barrier to older adults, given the steady dropoff in employment after age 50 due to deteriorating health, age discrimination, and increasing responsibility to provide care for aging family members.

This paper focuses on medical debt in California, and existing and potential policy solutions to ameliorate the ruinous financial effects of medical debt in the state.

California’s historic expansion of coverage to undocumented individuals has not only brought the state closer to universal coverage, but has also reduced racial disparities in health coverage. However, this progress is at risk due to a new state budget proposal that would curtail Medi-Cal benefits for certain immigrants, ahead of additional severe federal cuts to Medicaid being considered.