CalWatchdog – Page 6

From new regulations on ride-sharing to a ban on plastic bags, Californians lost plenty of liberty this legislative session. But freedom in the Golden State scored at least one small victory in 2014.

Gov. Jerry Brown recently signed into law a bipartisan bill that would ban the state from cooperating with warrantless spying by the federal government.

Senate Bill 828, co-authored by Sens. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, and Joel Anderson, R-Alpine, would ban state officials from complying with a federal agency’s request for electronic data if the state knows that request is illegal or unconstitutional. The bill is a response to the National Security Agency’s massive surveillance programs that collected phone and electronic data on millions of American citizens.

Lieu stands up for 4th Amendment

Dubbed the 4th Amendment Protection Act, the bill sailed through both houses of the Legislature without opposition.

“I commend Gov. Brown for recognizing that the National Security Agency’s massive and indiscriminate collecting of phone and electronic data on all Americans, including more than 38 million Californians, is a threat to our liberty and freedom,” Lieu said. “We can only hope the feds halt this illegal and unconstitutional practice nationally.”

Supporters of the bill, which include the American Civil Liberties Union of California, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, California Attorneys for Criminal Justice and the Consumer Federation of California, say that the new law is a symbolic victory for constitutional principles.

“The federal government’s dragnet collection of millions of phone records and metadata is very troubling,” said CAIR-Sacramento Valley Executive Director Basim Elkarra. “We are happy to see California leading the way in pushing back against the unconstitutional data collection by the NSA and ensuring the observance of the Fourth Amendment, as a basic principle of this nation’s founding and democratic values.”

Orwellian technology exposed by Snowden

As CalWatchdog.com first reported in January, Lieu’s legislation comes in response to last summer’s revelations by former defense contractor and government whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been collecting phone data on millions of Americans. In December, a federal judge ruled that the bulk collection of Americans’ phone records is likely unconstitutional.

“The almost-Orwellian technology that enables the government to store and analyze the phone metadata of every telephone user in the United States is unlike anything that could have been conceived in 1979,” Judge Richard Leon wrote in his December ruling.

California’s new law covers “electronically stored information,” which is any data stored in a digital form, as well as the metadata surrounding any communication. Metadata is the “data about data” and can include the time, date, location, duration, origin or identity of the persons. In many cases, such information can be as revealing as the content of a call or email itself.

“New technology is demonstrating just how sensitive metadata can be: how friend lists can reveal a person’s sexual orientation, purchase histories can identify a pregnancy before any visible signs appear, and location information can expose individuals to harassment for unpopular political views or even theft and physical harm,” the American Civil Liberties Union of California explained in its February 2014 white paper, “Metadata: Piecing Together a Privacy Solution.”

Feds occasionally rely on state for data

According to the legislative analysis, federal agencies occasionally rely “upon services provided by the state and/or private entities that provide services on behalf of the state” in order to illegally collect data.

“SB 828 makes clear that the state of California will continue to uphold the Fourth Amendment rights of its citizens, even under pressure from the federal government,” said Anderson, the Republican coauthor of the bill. “Our nation is unequivocally dedicated to stopping terrorism, yet we must be ever vigilant that our desire for safety does not come at the expense of the freedoms and liberty our enemies seek to destroy.”

The new law, which is less than 200 words in length, is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, 2015. Here’s the text of the bill:

Senate Bill 828: 4th Amendment Protection Act

The state shall not provide material support, participation, or assistance in response to a request from a federal agency or an employee of a federal agency to collect the electronically stored information or metadata of any person if the state has actual knowledge that the request constitutes an illegal or unconstitutional collection of electronically stored information or metadata.

This article originally appeared on CalWatchdog.com

Originally published on CalWatchdog.com:

A quarter-million Medi-Cal applicants have been waiting more than 45 days, and in some cases nearly a year, either to receive coverage or find out why their application has been denied.

That’s an improvement from the 900,000 applicants who were languishing in early summer without coverage or word from Medi-Cal. But it will take another six weeks for most of the remaining 250,000 residents to receive or be denied coverage, according to Department of Health Care Services Director Toby Douglas.

At a Sept. 23 Assembly Health Committeeoversight hearing, Douglas touted the Medi-Cal expansion as a “tremendous success,” but cautioned the enrollment backlog may never be totally cleared.

Legislators expressed frustration that their constituents are being dropped from coverage without notice, getting the run-around when they try to find out what’s happening with their applications or never being informed about the potential for Medi-Cal coverage in the first place.

“It’s taking months – months – to check on the status of cases,” said Assemblyman Jim Patterson, R-Fresno. “We are completely unable to help constituents in a timely manner. And it’s happening over and over again.”

Patterson said applicants seeking information are getting caught in what he called a referral loop. “They are told the state is just a billing agency and they need to contact the county,” he said. “The county says, ‘It’s not our job, you have to go talk to the state.’ This is a loop that’s going on and on. We get the concerns that they are bounced from person to person, and everyone saying they can’t address the issue and they need to call somebody else.”

Covered California

Two million patients have been added to the Medi-Cal rolls the past year through the new Covered California exchange, part of the federal Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Medi-Cal now covers 11 million Californians – about 29 percent of state residents. The Medi-Cal budget is more than $90 billion, an 80 percent increase from just four years ago, according to committee ChairmanAssemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento.

The application-processing delays have been due to the unexpectedly large increase in applications, technical snafus and administrative decisions to delay coverage until residency and income are verified, according to Cathy Senderling, deputy executive director of the County Welfare Directors Association.

“We are in a situation where it’s been incredibly exciting to have the Affordable Care Act after so much planning,” she said. “But it’s also been very frustrating for our workers and we know for our customers as well.”

Most of the 250,000 cases remaining in the backlog are in some stage of being worked on, she said. “Many of them actually need to be denied. And the capacity of the system has not yet been brought up to be able to do that because of the way it was programmed and the confusion that would be created for our customers.”

Patterson argued that these kinds of snafus are inherent in “a state-run and sort of a command-and-control approach to health care.”

“We asked for this,” he said. “By doing the things we have done, by taking this Affordable Care Act, putting a California overlay on it and the 2 million additional, all of the things that we have done, we should have understood that this would be the result, that we were going to end up with significant bureaucratic problems, that we were inviting these very kinds of problems.

“So I think to suggest that we are the victims of success doesn’t sit well with the people that are trying to be the examples of the success. And so the backlogs, the payment, the notifications, the dropping of individuals, all of this is really creating a serious matter of an urgent level. And I hope that you can take that back to your organization and the governor and others in charge.”

Backlog

Elizabeth Landsberg, director of legislative advocacy for the Western Center on Law and Poverty, pointed out that many of the hundreds of thousands of people stuck in the Medi-Cal backlog have suffered as a result.

“Some people are going without health care and having terrible health consequences,” she said. “Some can’t get care tests because they can’t pay out of pocket for them. And some are going into medical debt and facing collections because of it. This is a story about real people, our neighbors, our friends, our fellow Californians.

“It’s a story about a woman with severe pain from diverticulitis who has been using the emergency room when her pain is severe. The doctor said she needs to get non-urgent treatment of the condition to prevent the severe pain and the trips to the emergency room. We have patients going to the emergency room, but they cannot get on Medi-Cal and get the care that they need. Emergency rooms don’t provide that.

“This is story of a woman who applied through the Covered California portal in December, was told she should be eligible for Medi-Cal. She has medical bills from May 2014 and she has a hospital threatening her with collection actions against her. This is the story of a man who also applied nine months ago and has to pay out of pocket for insulin pump supplies and was hospitalized for diabetes complications affecting his heart.”

Landsberg said the state is not informing applicants of “their right to file for a fair hearing if they don’t have a timely eligibility determination. State law is clear, we have to make these decisions within 45 days.”

Her organization, along with several other advocacy groups, filed a lawsuit in Alameda County Superior Court on Sept. 17, Rivera vs. Toby Douglas, seeking to force the state to comply with its own law.

“Consumers simply don’t know that something’s going wrong if they don’t get an answer,” said Landsberg. “They get one notice from Medi-Cal saying, ‘We think you’re eligible for Medi-Cal, you’ll hear if you are.’ Many people still are familiar with the old rules where childless couples weren’t eligible for Medi-Cal. They don’t know that something’s wrong.”

Access

Assemblyman Roger Hernandez, D-West Covina, is also concerned that his constituents are being left in the dark.

“People are asking how we get folks connected with access to health care,” he said. “I’m concerned representing a community … where we see a high level of immigrant, working class, Latino and minority populations that are not having the same access to registration and information about how to sign up as other non-Latino groups are. That’s a problem in terms of outreach.”

Douglas assured the committee that improvements are being made. “Everyone is working around the clock,” he said. “What I want to report to you, and where we will get soon, is that every individual that applies and is providing all the information necessary will get enrolled in the program in the appropriate timeframes. And that’s what we need to get to. And we’re not there yet.

“The system continues to get a lot better. This continues to be a work in progress. We were quick in implementing health care reform. And it’s going to take next year still to work through some of these final system stages.”

He cautioned, though, that as his department works to get things right with the first year of Medi-Cal applications through the Covered California exchange, those applications will soon be coming up for renewal, potentially creating new challenges.

CA bans state cooperation with warrantless spying