California Endowment Grants $23M

The California Endowment has granted $23 million to help 36 counties in California with outreach in order to increase enrollment in Medi-Cal.

The money will be used for outreach to Californians who may be eligible to enroll in the program but have not yet done so. Specific groups will be targeted for Medi-Cal enrollment, including those mental health needs; the homeless, those who are incarcerated or on parole, those with limited English proficiency and young men of color. 

“It’s important that we continue working with counties to make sure our messages about Medi-Cal coverage are reaching everyone with good information they can easily and readily use,” said Toby Douglas, director of the California Department of Health Care Services, which administers the Medi-Cal program.

Medi-Cal income guidelines were relaxed under the Affordable Care Act, with the income cutoff raised to 138% of the federal poverty level. Some 584,000 residents were enrolled in the program via applications to the Covered California health insurance exchange through Dec. 31. About 1 million Californians were expected to enroll by this spring.

The grants range in size from $100,000, which went to several rural counties in Northern California, to more than $7 million for Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the nation.

“We are excited to partner with DHCS to fund outreach and enrollment assistance at the local level, said Robert K. Ross, M.D., chief executive officer of the California Endowment. “This is an important investment that will help hundreds of thousands of Californians enroll in Medi-Cal.”