vetoes<\/a> them, and has done so for eight years.<\/p>\nThe issue is the effort to provide hearing aids for children who need them at crucial, very young ages so that they keep up developmentally with their siblings and peers. The way to do that is to require healthcare plans to cover children\u2019s hearing aids the same way as they do other important medical solutions for growing infants. Thirty-five states have such mandates, including Texas, Georgia and Ohio.<\/p>\n
But California won\u2019t do it, because of Newsom\u2019s vetoes, which it doesn\u2019t take a political savant to see would seem to be related to the objections of my own healthcare provider, Kaiser, which doesn\u2019t want to absorb the cost. And which, as it happens, has given nearly $100 million in grants for Newsom projects on homelessness, wildfires and COVID-19.<\/p>\n
But there actually was a California agency allocated $30 million in recent years to get hearing aids, which cost around $6,000, to babies in the state who need them but whose families can\u2019t afford them. That\u2019s the good news. The very bad if unsurprising news is that the Hearing Aid Coverage for Children Program, HACCP, spent $23 million of that on administrative costs and managed to get fewer than 300 children hearing aids. Pretty dismal return on investment.<\/p>\n
About 20,000 California children still need hearing aids. It wouldn\u2019t get to them all, but I recently talked with Michelle Marciniak, the founder of a group called Let California Kids Hear, who says there is a fix that would allow the remaining $7 million to help about 16,000 kids get the devices they need.<\/p>\n
Again, it\u2019s simple: A proposal presented to Newsom now would require that the rest of the HACCP money be used solely for hearing aids.<\/p>\n
Why does it matter so much? Marciniak\u2019s group of volunteer moms lobbying Sacramento again puts it simply: Delays in obtaining hearing aids can directly affect speech, language, and literacy development.<\/p>\n
Her involvement is personal. When her daughter Marie was in preschool, the teacher came to Michelle and said, \u201cThere\u2019s something wrong. \u00a0She\u2019s starting to lose language skills.\u201d So Michelle and her husband took Marie in for tests and found out she was hard of hearing after having a virus. They were lucky, and could afford the hearing aids. But they\u2019d joined a support group for other parents with the same issue, and many moms there couldn\u2019t pay the price. Several of them literally quit their jobs in desperation so that they would be income-eligible for help from Medi-Cal.<\/p>\n
So Michelle and a cohort of moms founded Let California Kids Hear a decade ago, and formerly little Marie, now 15, became a key spokesperson for the group, addressing numerous legislative committee hearings in Sacramento, becoming a frequent flyer on Southwest.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe governor has four kids so I thought, great,\u201d Michelle told me. But the bureaucracy spent its money on bureaucracy, not hearing aids. Still, what if that last $7 million went just to the devices that are so needed? Simple, right?<\/p>\n
Plus, the group still wants health plans to pay for kids\u2019 hearing aids. But Newsom, in his May budget revision, took the latest effort to require that out of his proposal. \u201cI don\u2019t understand,\u201d Michelle says. \u201cHe blamed it on Dr. Oz and (the federal) HHS. Everyone\u2019s telling us to come back when there\u2019s a new governor.\u00a0 We won\u2019t accept that.\u201d Because thousands of California kids don\u2019t have the time for another delay.<\/p>\n
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board.\u00a0lwilson@scng.com.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Some important, unsolved, intractable issues in politics, particularly California politics, are just so complex that they boggle the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":8028,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,975,2082],"class_list":["post-329373","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-columnists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}