Many Californians Claim Health Insurance Price Too High

Two-thirds of Californians who did not have health insurance in the year 2014 were really eligible for coverage, but many did not enroll because of the high price, in accordance to a study out today by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

“We are a relatively high cost-of-living state,” stated Miranda Dietz, a researcher at UC Berkeley and the study’s lead author, in a press release. “It is no wonder few Californians, who may be unaware they qualify for health subsidies [on the marketplace exchange called Covered California] and other programs, still find the price of health insurance out of reach.

“Some people who are already stretched paying their rent, filling the car to get to work and feeding the kids, figuring out how to come up with more money for health care on top of that is a lot to manage.”

The researchers deployed their findings on data from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) of the year 2014, the most recent CHIS data present.

While President Obama’s 2010 Affordable Care Act (ACA) permitted millions of Californians access to health care by permitting them to buy insurance on the online marketplace exchange or by enrolling in Medicaid (Medi-Cal in California), the ACA was placed off limits to those who were not legal residents.

Approximately one-third of the almost 1 million Californians who do not qualify for health coverage under the ACA are predominantly low-income, Latino and have limited English proficiency, the study indicated.