Schwarzenegger Budget Denies Some Health Care
By JOHN M. BRODER

Published: January 18, 2004

LOS ANGELES, Jan. 17 — It is nearly impossible for many Californians to comprehend the sum of $14 billion, the current estimate of the state's budget deficit next year, and the cuts and contortions that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed to make it disappear.

So think about $320 a month, the price for Esther Bush to include her 8-year-old daughter, Natalia, on her employer-paid health plan. She says she cannot afford it. Governor Schwarzenegger says the state cannot afford to insure Natalia, either.

Ms. Bush, a medical social worker at a nonprofit agency in Los Angeles, is not poor — she earns nearly $30,000 a year — but neither has she climbed into the middle class. Ms. Bush, 33, shares a two-bedroom apartment in a dicey Los Angeles neighborhood with her sister and brother-in-law and their three children. She drives a 1989 Ford Tempo, pays $300 a month for after-school care for her daughter and lives, she said, from paycheck to paycheck.

Until last spring, Natalia received medical coverage under Medi-Cal, the state's Medicaid program. But when Ms. Bush received a small increase in her salary, she no longer qualified for the program and instead was told to apply to Healthy Families, a state-federal health insurance program for the near-poor.

Because of computer and paperwork problems, her application was delayed, as the state's fiscal situation continued to deteriorate. Governor Schwarzenegger, in his budget presentation last week, proposed capping enrollment in the Healthy Families program at the current level, 732,000 children. An estimated 300,000 additional children are eligible, but could be enrolled only as new slots open under the cap.

New applicants, like Natalia, will be placed on a waiting list, as Ms. Bush put it, "for God knows how long." In the meantime, Ms. Bush prays that no emergencies befall her. As it is, she spends four hours waiting to see a doctor at a neighborhood clinic when her daughter has an ear infection or stomachache.