Medi-Cal Enrollment by District and County 2024
This page provides estimates of the number of individuals and percentage of population enrolled in Medi-Cal by county, congressional district, assembly district, and senate district, as of June 2024.
Health Care
Health policy
Uninsured
Miranda Dietz (she/her) is a senior policy researcher at the Labor Center and project director of the California Simulation of Insurance Markets microsimulation model (CalSIM). CalSIM, developed jointly with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, models the impacts of various policies on health insurance coverage in California. Miranda’s research has focused on development of the model, estimates of the uninsured, and churn in and out of insurance coverage. Miranda has also written on local enforcement of labor standards, low-wage airport workers, and temporary workers in California. She is co-editor with Michael Reich and Ken Jacobs of When Mandates Work: Raising Labor Standards at the Local Level. Miranda received a Master of Public Policy degree from UC Berkeley in 2012, and a bachelor’s degree in government from Harvard University.
This page provides estimates of the number of individuals and percentage of population enrolled in Medi-Cal by county, congressional district, assembly district, and senate district, as of June 2024.
The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) included additional federal subsidies to make health insurance more affordable in the individual market, but these expire at the end of 2025. If Congress does not extend the expanded subsidies and levels revert to those in the original Affordable Care Act, all 2.37 million Californians in the individual market—including those not receiving subsidies—would face higher health insurance premiums and be forced to choose between more expensive coverage, less generous coverage, or forgoing coverage all together and going uninsured.
These comments were submitted to the California Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA) in advance of the Board’s meeting in Monterey County on August 28, 2024. The comments describe the data and research showing that Monterey County has among the highest hospital prices in the state and country.
Comments submitted to the California Office of Health Care Affordability (OHCA) in response to the proposal of a 3.0% statewide health care spending growth target for 2025 to 2029.
Consumer health care affordability has deteriorated over the past two decades in California due to rising premiums along with increasingly common and increasingly large deductibles for job-based coverage. This report documents these trends and their implications for Californian’s health and financial well-being, and recommends how California’s new Office of Health Care Affordability can monitor consumer affordability metrics in order to ensure that consumers benefit from the office’s efforts to control growth in per capita health care spending.
The Biden-era policies contributed to the lowest rate of uninsured U.S. residents in history. If they are allowed to expire next year, experts such as Miranda Dietz said they worry that health insurance costs and the rate of uninsured Americans will increase significantly.
“There are about half a million folks who are undocumented but earn too much for Medi-Cal, so they are uninsured,” Dietz said. “They’re also not part of DACA, because that program no longer accepts new applicants.”
“I think we know that health care is unaffordable, but to see how much that problem has gotten worse in 20 years is really something,” said Miranda Dietz, a policy research specialist at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and co-author of the report. “The costs are taking up more and more of a family’s budget.”
“It’s not just that everything is getting more expensive. It’s that health care in particular is eating up a bigger and bigger chunk of people’s budgets,” said Miranda Dietz.
Nearly 391,000 of those caught in the glitch would qualify for subsidies on Covered California, the state-based insurance exchange, noted health policy researcher Miranda Dietz of the UC Berkeley Labor Center. She worked with colleagues at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research to examine the impact of the changes in IRS regulations prior to their approval.
According to estimates by UCLA and UC Berkeley, Altman said, almost half a million Californians have employer-sponsored coverage that is less affordable than what they will be able to obtain now on Covered California. An additional 87,000 Californians who could be helped by the new rule are uninsured today, and about 35,000 have policies that aren’t currently subsidized.
“It makes it so it’s very disheartening to take away these extra subsidies that have been really crucial in improving affordability for folks,” Miranda Dietz said.
Miranda Dietz, a research and policy associate at UC Berkeley Labor Center, said the significant increase in the number of Californians with health insurance over the last two years would be in jeopardy without the federal subsidies.
“Folks who are under age 26 who are low-income and undocumented can get full scope medical coverage through the state and this expands that to be 50 and above,” Dietz explained. “But, as you can imagine that still leaves a significant number of Californians ages 26 to 49 who are low-income and documented who are without insurance coverage.”
According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, one in 10 low-income workers experiences wage theft in California. Violations range from getting paid below minimum wage to working off the clock or without overtime pay, resulting in thousands of dollars in lost compensation per worker.