A Dozen Health Consumer Bills On Governor Schwarzenegger's Desk

• AB 423 (Beall): Would expand Knox-Keene to include diagnosis and treatment of mental illnesses. SUPPORT

• SB 474 (Kuehl): Would clarify that hospitals would continue to get paid the same amount under the federal hospital financing waiver and extends the sunset date to the 2007-08 fiscal year. Would also protect patients who live in Los Angeles and will be impacted by the closure of the Martin Luther King Jr.-Drew Medical Center SB 474 would create a special fund that would pay for services that would have otherwise been provided by King-Drew Medical Center . Los Angeles County would contract with other providers in the area to assure that patients could continue to receive care. SUPPORT

• SB 472 (Corbett): which would require state Board of Pharmacy to come up with standardized drug labeling for prescription medications. SUPPORT

• AB 343 (Solorio): Would require the state to disclose names of employers who, rather than providing health coverage, have many of their workers and their families on Medi-Cal and Healthy Families. (Gov. Schwarzenegger vetoed a similar bill – AB1840 (Horton) -- last year.) SUPPORT

• AB 910 (Karnette): Would ensure that privately-purchased health coverage for children with mental or physical disabilities would not end at a certain age. SUPPORT

• AB 1113 (Brownley): Would extend and increase eligibility for the Medi-Cal California Working Disabled Program. SUPPORT

• AB 1324 (De La Torre): Would require health plans to justify to DOI or DMHC why they are rescinding health coverage to enrollees. Health plans may not recover costs of care provided to enrollees unless they can prove consumers purposely deceived them. SUPPORT

A bill to expand children's coverage, AB 1 (Laird/Dymally), passed both the Assembly and the Senate, but was held in the Legislature by the author, at the request of the Schwarzenegger Administration. AB 1 would allow children in families up to 300% of poverty to enroll in Healthy Families. This is a repeat of the last version of AB772 (Chan), which was vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger in 2005. The Governor has stated he wants children's coverage as part of a broader reform package.

Also of note is SB 350 (Runner), which makes technical changes to California' s landmark legislation last year, AB 774(Chan) to prevent the practice of hospital overcharging. Health Access California, the sponsor of AB 774, is neutral after working with the authors and sponsor. Also of interest to some health advocates is AB 12 (Beall), which would create the Adult Health Coverage Expansion Program in Santa Clara County, which would be administered by a county or local initiative.

Bills of interest to health advocates that were not sent to the Governor and will be pending for next year include:

• SB 840 (Kuehl): Would establish a universal, single-payer health care system in California that would enable all Californians to have available, affordable, and automatic health coverage. This bill passed the full Legislature for the first time in 2006, but was vetoed by Gov. Schwarzenegger.

• SB 1014 (Kuehl): The financing piece of SB840, which would impose an income tax of 3.78 percent for workers earning less than $200,000 annually. Employers would pay 8.14 percent of payroll toward system. Would impose an additional personal income tax for those earning more than $200,000 to fund SB840's single payer system, in lieu of premiums and cost-sharing.

• SB 32 (Steinberg): Expands children’s coverage, including the Healthy Families program, to all children in families up to 300% of poverty ($49,800 for a family of 3). Identical to AB 1(Laird)

• AB 2 (Dymally): Would reform and restructure the Managed Risk Medical Insurance Program, for the medically uninsurable, who are denied coverage elsewhere because of “pre-existing conditions." Also restructures the individual insurance market to assure any Californian who wants coverage can get it. This bill has been reintroduced in special session as ABX1-3 .

• AB 51 (Dymally): Would have created a consumer report card for Medicare Part D plans.

• AB 52 (Dymally): Would have required the state to operate a 24-hour, toll-free number for patients to register complaints about hospital facilities.

• SB 606 (Scott): Would have required pharmaceutical companies to disclose clinical trial results for drugs sold in the state.

• AB 1554 (Jones): Would have regulated insurance premium rates by requiring DMHC/DOI approval before copayments, premiums, coinsurance, deductibles or other out-of-pocket costs could be increased.

Health Access California is a statewide health care consumer advocacy coalition of over 200 groups.