Bill Monning Speaks On Health Care Issues Facing Seniors in Monterey, CA: View From Family inHome Caregiving, Carmel, CA

Assemblymember Bill Monning, who is Chair of the Assembly Committee on Health spoke 4/1 at a panel sponsored by the Monterey Better Business Bureau at Pasadera, and one of his key themes was to urge support for an extension of temporary taxes that are only in place until June 30.
Legislators have been sending pieces of the budget to Governor Brown piece meal, and thus far $11 bil. has been slashed , but there is a long way to go to close the $26.6 bil. estimated shortfall this year. Monning said half of the budget cuts have been to health and human service programs like Medi-Cal, and Brown plans to fund roughly half of the budget shortfall with revenue from extending the temporary taxes. However, that requires voter approval, as well as 2/3 voting to have a special election in both the State Assembly and Senate.
“We think the crisis demands that voters be given the opportunity to decide whether to do all cuts,” said Monning. “An all cuts budget would be Armageddon for this state,” he said. As I have written many times on my blog, many of these cuts will cost more in the long run than the money they will save in the short-term. This was a focus of Monning’s keynote speech. He said that more people will be ending up in the emergency room instead of at a primary care provider, a much more expensive proposition. However, President Obama’s health care reform goes a long way to helping this situation.
Currently there are 8.2 mil. Californians without insurance and if health care reform (which is facing legal challenges and is going before the Supreme Court) is implemented, about 4 to 4.5 mil. will become eligible for affordable insurance. The remainder are undocumented workers who won’t be eligible. Monning said health reform would expand access and bring down costs.
With many programs being cut out of Medi-Cal, this would surely be welcome news to low income Californians, although we need to pull ourselves out of the budget crisis first. Brown was trying to get a special election to ballot in June but that window has closed and it appears as if it may not come to ballot until November–if at all. Legislators are considering passing a law calling for the special election with a simple majority, but that would surely face legal challenges.

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About the Author

After more than a decade of caregiving, both in a professional environment and for a 97 year old family member Richard Kuehn was dissatisfied with service from local caregiving agencies. He became convinced of the need for a service which provides very personal assistance to the elderly and founded Family inHome Caregiving serving the Monterey Peninsula.