Gary Wilson: Most Medi-Cal money going to ‘small’ number of super-utilizers
Re “Medi-Cal growth feeds campaign to raise rates” (Page B2, June 4): Jeremy B. White provides some answers to the question of what it means to fully fund Medi-Cal in his article.
But a clearer picture of the entire Medi-Cal budget situation is presented by David Gorn, senior editor of California Healthline. I urge readers to search for Gorn’s article “Surprising Results from Pilot Program” from June 4 at californiahealthline.org. There readers will see the entire Medi-Cal budget for the current fiscal year is $91.3 billion. Healthcare under Medi-Cal will cost about $77 billion. The feds supply just over $51 billion and the state provides just over $26 billion.
About $46 billion goes to about 600,000 people. These are the disabled, chronically ill and elderly. This averages to about $75,000 a year per person, which observers label “super utilizers.”
What scares me about these figures is the number of homeless people I see have a very high probability of becoming super utilizers and boosting these costs into the stratosphere. The other $31 billion is spread among the other 11.7 million Medi-Cal recipients. This averages about $2,600 per person for this group.
Gary Wilson, Modesto
This story was originally published June 11, 2015 at 6:16 PM with the headline "Gary Wilson: Most Medi-Cal money going to ‘small’ number of super-utilizers."