CFCE Blog

Foundation TV Ad Off Target

By Loren Kaye
Posted 7/31/2007

The California Endowment has a long track record of serious education and research on health care matters, especially supporting access to affordable, quality health care for underserved individuals and communities.  It is a serious, first-class charitable foundation.  But its sincere commitment to urgently push for health care reform in California is undermined by misleading arguments it is making in a $6 million media campaign.

Their TV ad intersperses medical scenes with printed slides that read, "Emergency Room wait times are getting longer," and "Health care costs cause half of California's bankruptcies."

 In fact, these arguments are myths.

According to the California Healthcare Foundation, emergency department use may actually be declining in California.  "While California's population grew 3.4% from 2003 to 2006, emergency room visits have actually decreased slightly.  Recent research shows a decline in visits by 4.7% from 2003 to 2005."

Governor Schwarzenegger has repeated the assertion that half of personal bankruptices are a result of medical care debt.  While not using California-specific data, this Harvard Medical School study has been widely cited.  But far less notice has been made of this debunking of the study, noting that "medical cause" was defined as any bankruptcy that included at least $1,000 in medical debt, among all the debts.  A more credible study by federal officials found that less than 10 percent of all cases represent 80 percent of all medical debt.

There are excellent reasons to urge state policy makers to address health care reform, but repeating myths is not helpful to the policy debate.

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