Excerpted from the Willow Glen Times
By Assemblymember Jim Beall, Jr.

Special to the Times

Staying healthy in this economy is a prerequisite. Lose your health and you risk losing your job and with it the employer-based health insurance. Lose that insurance and you could be one catastrophic illness away from bankruptcy.

As more Californians lose their jobs during these tough economic times, more of us will be scrambling to find affordable health care - a daunting task given the fact that of all the industrialized nations in the world, the U.S. has the highest costs for health care.

That unassailable fact has put health care out of reach for hundreds of thousands of Californians from seniors to children. The Legislature has passed bills to institute a universal, single-payer health care system but the governor has vetoed it every time, citing potential costs during a period of deficits.

So until the political and economic climates change, my approach is to achieve what we can to help people now. If that means tackling the issue of health care one person at a time, so be it.

My health care agenda this year is a designed to expand health coverage to more Santa Clara County residents and increase access to quality services for all Californians.

I am reintroducing the Mental Health Parity bill, legislation that would require insurers to provide coverage for mental health disorders and substance abuse addictions on par with physical illnesses, conditions, or injuries. If passed, Assembly Bill 244 would provide stronger protection for consumers than the federal version. Last year, my parity bill passed the Legislature but was vetoed by the governor.

I'm also reviving another worthy insurance-related bill that was vetoed last year: A proposal that builds on the Healthy Workers Program and expands health coverage to the dependents of enrollees. The Healthy Workers Program was the first bill I introduced as a freshman legislator. It is designed for low-income workers employed by small businesses that don’t offer insurance. This program is patterned after the highly successful Children's Health Initiative, which I helped get off the ground when I was a Santa Clara County supervisor. About 154,000 children in our county have now signed up for health care.

Mental health parity and increasing the availability of health insurance saves taxpayer dollars by cutting public medical costs for covering the uninsured. It's all about prevention — stopping problems before they grow.

That's why I think a proposal I made last year deserves another look by the Legislature: Instituting a pilot program for the universal screening, assessment, referral, and treatment of pregnant women and women of childbearing age who are suffering from alcohol and drug abuse. The program would be paid for with federal funding.

Every year, prenatal exposure to drugs or liquor harms unborn children. Fetal alcohol syndrome, FAS, is the leading preventable cause of defects and developmental disabilities. The lifetime cost for a child with FAS is approximately $2 million; much of it is borne by taxpayers.

If we can effectively educate women about the dangers drug and alcohol use poses to their unborn through a simple, unobtrusive process of screening and brief interventions, we will reduce the incidence of developmental disabilities.

To keep Santa Clara County healthy, we need to keep our hospitals healthy, too. State law requires hospitals to meet new seismic safety standards by 2013 or face possible closure. To help our county’s only public hospital — Santa Clara Valley Medical Center — pay for hundreds of millions in structural upgrades, I am re-introducing a bill that makes supplemental federal Medicaid funds available to offset a portion of the costs once the upgrades are completed. As home to the region’s most sophisticated burn treatment center as well as a Level 1 trauma center, Valley Med is integral to the welfare of our growing county.

As chairman of the Assembly Select Committee on Alcohol and Drug Abuse, I have convened hearings throughout the state to improve California’s approach to treating addiction, a problem that exacts a toll of more than $38 billion in prison, health, justice, and societal costs annually. But this problem cannot be solved with a cookie-cutter approach. Treatment plans must be tailored to meet the patient's unique needs. As a result, I plan to introduce legislation to make buprenorphine, also known as "bupe," available through the Drug Medi-Cal Program.

Bupe was approved last year for prescription by federal authorities as a treatment for opiate addictions. Research has shown Bupe is not as addictive as methadone, another medication for heroin. But unlike methadone, Bupe creates less of a high, offering a patient the opportunity to get completely off it in the hopes of living a drug-free and medication-free life.

Jim Beall Jr. is a member of the California State Assembly, representing the 24th District, including Willow Glen, Campbell, South San Jose, West San Jose, Saratoga, plus portions of Santa Clara, Los Gatos and North San Jose.