Isabel Coronel, 76, walked in a hospital for the first time in almost 30 years last month. Coronel, an undocumented immigrant, had spent decades laboring in Inland Empire fields, picking watermelon, cilantro and radishes. She didn’t have health insurance and feared deportation if she tried to access medical care. She endured high cholesterol and blood pressure, severe knee pain, vision loss and the long-term effects of her January bout with COVID-19 rather than risk a hospital visit. That changed on May 1, when Coronel became eligible for Medi-Cal. She was among 235,000 undocumented adults who gained access to the state’s income-based health insurance network through a new expansion of the program signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last year. “I give thanks to God that I now have my Medi-Cal because I didn’t go to the doctor before,” Coronel sais in Spanish. “Many of us need to go to the doctors and we don’t because we don’t have the ways to do so and we have fear of everything.” Her access to health care follows a decade-long campaign in California’s Capitol to build a social safety net for the state’s roughly 2.3 million undocumented immigrants, an effort that culminated last month when Newsom signed a budget bill extending Medi-Cal access to all remaining uncovered adults. The milestones include driver’s licenses, protections from deportation, tax breaks, COVID-19 pandemic relief and now health care. It’s the strongest social safety net for undocumented immigrants in the country, advocates say. Undocumented immigrants “don’t get out of the system, what they put into the system so I hope this serves as an example to the rest of the country,” said Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles. “We’re in the forefront of policies to treat the undocumented as real Americans, real Californians because they contribute so much.”
Read more at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263277953
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