I'm Impressed With CA's Medi-Cal (Cal Optima)

They are on top of things.

Short story - when I went to sign up for Obamacare in CA, I found out that we qualified for the Medicaid expansion. That kicked in on 1/1/14.

We had to pick a primary network, so we opted for Kaiser. Turns out Kaiser wasn't taking new patients at the time, so we were put into another network. My chiro told me he was in the Monarch network, so we switched to Monarch, which will start on 5/1.

Yesterday, Cal Optima called my wife to tell her that Kaiser was now open to new patients and asked her if we wanted to switch from Monarch to Kaiser, as Kaiser was our original choice.

We declined - figure we'll check out Monarch first. If it doesn't work for us, no problem - Cal Optima allows you to change provider network every month if you so wish.

I was impressed that they gave us a call to see if we wanted to switch to Kaiser. When would an insurance company ever do such a thing? Impressed because they must be dealing with hundreds of thousands of new patients under CA's Medicaid expansion, yet they made the time to call us just to make sure we were getting what we wanted.

More important to us, if it wasn't for the Medicaid expansion, we wouldn't have insurance.

BTW - my chiro visit last month cost me 33% LESS under Cal Optima than it cost me when I was without insurance. Not bad.

Another Obamacare success story, IMO.