Looking back on a momentous year for California health care consumers, earlier this week Health Access California released its 2019 Legislative Scorecard highlighting key bills supported by health care consumer advocates in the 2019 legislative session. The report details how policymakers voted on key bills to protect patients, expand coverage, and increase oversight on insurers, the health industry, and prescription drug prices.
Most of the twenty-two bills scored were also part of the #Care4AllCA campaign of over 70 health, consumer, community, labor, and business groups seeking a more affordable, accountable, and accessible health care system in California, with the goal of universal coverage in California.
Forty-four legislators voted with health care consumers 100% of the time, with another 26 siding with consumers over 90% of the time.
Many of the bills analyzed were proposals to enact first-in-the-nation expansions and investments in our health care system. These include bills to expand coverage, authorizing new affordability assistance beyond that in the ACA to lower premium costs for the over one million people who purchase care through Covered California. Other bills would allow Medi-Cal to expand to all income-eligible Californians, regardless of immigration status. While some of these reforms were made through the budget process, this scorecard reflects the votes on the policy proposals, in the Health Committees and on the Assembly and Senate floor. This scorecard also reflects major policy strides taken to tackle the skyrocketing cost of care by helping to lower premiums and prescription drug costs, and holding the health industry more accountable for better health outcomes on quality and equity.
This scorecard provides a useful snapshot of which legislators sided with health care consumers to support key legislation that improves the health system on which we all rely. We thank our legislative champions — the third of California State Senators and Assemblymembers voted with health care consumers 100% of the time — and we hope more will join them this year.
Some of these votes were closely contested, with funded opposition, and so we appreciate those legislators than sided with patients over profiteering parts of the health industry. We urge Californians to take a look at this scorecard to learn where their elected representatives stood on vital health care issues, and whether their legislator chose to stand with health consumers or not.
In the 2019 legislative session, health consumers got 100% support from 16 Senators: Atkins, Beall, Bradford, Durazo, Gonzalez, Hertzberg, Jackson, Leyva, McGuire, Mitchell, Monning, Pan, Portantino, Skinner, Wieckowski, and Weiner. Health consumers got 100% support from 28 Assemblymembers: Aguiar-Curry, Berman, Bonta, Calderon, Chiu, Chu, Eggman, Friedman, Gabriel, Cristina Garcia, Gloria, Gonzalez Fletcher, Holden, Jones-Sawyer, Kalra, Levine, Limon, Quirk, Rendon, Reyes, Luz Rivas, Rodriguez, Santiago, Stone, Ting, Weber, Wicks and Wood.