Earlier: Finding health care outside employer-based programs part I, part II, part III.
The good news: After a little over 2 months on the waiting list, I finally got a letter letting me know that “space is now available in the California Major Risk Medical Insurance Program”!
As of Feb. 1, I’m now covered under the MRMIP plan, with Kaiser as my insurance provider. Hopefully this will end my health care woes for a long while — though I’m not exactly looking forward to the fact that I now have to find new Kaiser doctors and will be forced to make long treks to get to Kaiser-specific pharmacies.
Still, I feel somewhat lucky that at least California HAS an MRMIP plan — and that I can afford to pay for it.
That’s not to say California’s at the forefront of health care in the U.S., by any means. In fact, California’s getting sued a lot for health-care related issues these days:
>> San Francisco’s city attorney sued California state regulators, alleging that they approved a system that lets insurance companies discriminate against women, making them pay as much as 39% more than men for similar individual health care policies. The lawsuit could be dropped if either of two bills in the legislature seeking to address this gender inequity issue gets passed.
>> Emergency room doctors sued California because our emergency health care system’s “on life support,” mainly due to lack of Medi-Cal funding. Our state ranks dead last in the country for emergency care access.
>> The Medi-Cal program could get a boost from Obama’s economic stimulus plan — but how much help California will get is up for debate. “The House version of the bill that was approved this week would give financially strapped California about $11.1 billion in Medicaid funds to help pay for healthcare for the poor, according to the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. The measure the Senate will take up next week would provide about $9.6 billion.”
Earlier: Finding Health care outside employer-based programs part I, part II, part III.
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