Alternative Approaches at the Federal and State Level

The reason that the discussions and positions that you heard this morning are no longer being voiced so widely in California is because conditions have continued to deteriorate there rather dramatically. Like the rest of the country, we have a large uninsured population, but the percentage of our uninsured population is larger than the national average as a percentage of the non-elderly population. In the U.S. it's about eighteen percent; in California, it's over twenty-one percent. That means more than five million uninsured people.