At LAT, "L.A. County grapples with healthcare for remaining uninsured":
One long period of Obamacare hand-wringing in Los Angeles County will end Monday, as the window for residents to enroll in mandatory healthcare coverage comes to a close.So, the kind of outreach that will be undertaken over the next months and years is the kind of outreach to the disadvantaged that idiot Democrats have should have undertaken from day one. Instead, the damned ghouls had to reorganize one sixth of the U.S. economy, throw healthcare markets into utter disarray, and basically destroy their own electoral coalition in the process. Shoot, perhaps Obama's The One after all. It'd normally take some act of divine intervention to bring about that much pain and political destruction. But hey, from where I'm standing it's all good, lol.
But less than 24 hours later, county elected officials will be confronted with another politically sensitive facet of the nation's healthcare overhaul: how to manage roughly a million people, many of them poor or undocumented, who will remain uninsured either because they aren't eligible or failed to enroll.
Unlike some other counties in California, which are sidestepping the issue and leaving the problem largely to nonprofit free clinics, Los Angeles has committed to providing residents without coverage some system of government-supported medical care.
But the debate over what that care will look like — and how it will be funded — is only now getting started.
The county plans to set up a managed-care-like system for some uninsured residents, but advocates question whether the effort to get patients assigned to community clinics — and out of emergency rooms — will be enough. They plan to gather Tuesday before the county Board of Supervisors' weekly meeting and push for additional funding to expand the program.
"People want to sign up," said Tom Holler, co-executive director of One LA, a coalition of churches, synagogues and nonprofits that has been working to increase access to healthcare. "That's why we have to ask the county for more money."
Researchers at UCLA and UC Berkeley have estimated that 3 million to 4 million Californians will remain uninsured five years after the Affordable Care Act is implemented.
Anthony Wright, executive director of the advocacy group Health Access California, said that a third to one-half of L.A.'s million uninsured won't have documentation of legal residency. That means they won't be eligible for federally subsidized healthcare programs such as Medi-Cal and Covered California...
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