Links:
* At HealthyCA, Dan Weintraub reports on California’s decreasing teenage birth rate.
* More from Dan Weintraub’s Healthy CA: Medi-Cal is a value choice. Do we want to provide insurance for those under the poverty line or not? Prior to Gov. Davis, we only went to 86% of the poverty line, and then we went to 100%. That’s hardly a huge committment to the people of California. It requires that a family of four earn preposterously low incomes. Yet, those changes did create a surge in Medi-Cal recipients.
* Poizner plays populist by going after Anthem Blue Cross.
* The California Young Republicans voted overwhelmingly to endorse Steve Poizner for governor.
I wrote an essay a while back on how the poverty line is calculated and how far away it is from meeting the expenses of actual families:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
Basically, the poverty line is the cost of a minimal 1960s basket of groceries, multiplied by 3, then scaled every year by the CPI, which is the rate of inflation for consumer goods (and excludes food and energy).