At this stage in our wonderful lives, I think most of us understand how the choices we make really add up. No more taking things for granted — things like our Medicare, something we have paid and toiled over a lifetime and can finally collect. Or — can we?
I am a Santa Clarita resident and a Medicare recipient. Like many of you, I made a deliberate choice to purchase a Medicare supplement — coverage I pay for myself every month. I want to know that when the moment comes — and for all of us it will come — I can see any doctor, any specialist, any hospital, without asking permission, and without a committee deciding whether my care is justified.
I planned for this. I saved for this. I paid for this.
Medicare supplements like mine are not ordinary insurance. A specific category — Plan F — was permanently closed to new enrollees in 2020 and cannot be renewed once gone.
Under Assembly Bill 1900, the state intends to redirect our Medicare payments into a state fund that cannot legally operate until the state certifies it has sufficient money to run — a date that is not in the bill.
The coverage we selected, the coverage we pay for monthly, the coverage we planned our later years around — would be gone. Not improved. Not supplemented. Gone. And there is no provision in this bill that asks our permission.
Many Californians face genuine health care hardships and deserve better options. That is not in dispute. But the answer to one person’s denial of proper health care access should never be to dissolve another person’s.
Two questions deserve an answer before this bill advances any further.
First — in that gap, between the day our coverage ends and the day the new system is ready, what do we have?
Second — by whose measure does AB 1900 qualify as superior to the coverage we already have, and who is accountable if the promise does not hold?
I have asked my representatives these questions. I have not received the answer.
This is not the first time these questions have gone unanswered. AB 1900 has now failed to advance for the fourth consecutive session since 2017. It will return. The constitutional questions it raises have never been formally answered by any legislative body. The time to demand those answers is not when the bill is racing toward a deadline. It is now — while Sacramento is listening and your voice has room to be heard.
Every Medicare recipient in this valley has a stake in those answers. Read the bill. Ask your representatives. You planned for this. You earned it. You deserve to know.
Debbie Kaiser
Santa Clarita
