Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Not everyone has the financial means to obtain quality healthcare. One’s health is an essential part of their lives and the lives they carry out here on earth. Historically, before the implementation of Covered California, America has had a health insurance plan that did not promote and infringes on people’s equity, liberty and/or freedom due its lack of concentrated concern. This causes one to neglect their healthcare needs and leads to even greater implications. What Covered California does as a part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is implement health care insurance exchange where affordable quality health care can be made available to all California individuals and families of low income and small businesses. To better address the increase in health disparities and improve distribution, the state has created Covered California, an insurance exchange program and my proposed recommendation is to keep Covered California and improve upon it by expanding Medicaid, as referenced throughout this paper as Covered CA Aid that produces distributive justice and reduces health disparities by using scholarly sources, such as Comparative Federalism: Theory and Practice by Michael Burgess,  Addressing Social Determinants of Health Inequities: Learning From Doing by Elizabeth A. Baker, Marilyn M. Metzler, and Sandro Galea, and Taking the Root Causes of Health Disparities Through Community Capacity Building by Anthony Iton.