Pair of new laws aim to help ease health care access 

Prior authorization — when a doctor is required to get approval from a patient’s health insurance before prescribing medication, service, testing or other treatment — can create care bottlenecks that delays patient care and forces doctors to spend increasing amounts of time on paperwork, according to Becker’s office. 

In addition, Becker said, 1 in 5 doctors have seen a delay in care that resulted in hospitalization. This legislation aims to take services and treatments that are overwhelmingly approved out of that delayed cycle, offering patients more immediate care, he said. 

“Let’s not go through the paperwork and make everybody jump through to get it approved again,” he said. “Let’s just have it approved right away and have that care delivered right away.” 

Becker’s Senate Bill 338 is inspired by coastal Latino arts and programming nonprofit Ayudando Latinos A Soñar’s mobile health care services, which delivers virtual health care, mental health services and educational programming to coastal farmworkers where they’re at in collaboration with Life Science Cares. 

The bill establishes a pilot program for two similar virtual health care hubs, which will be run by local community-based organizations, to serve rural farmworker communities. The pilot program will use a philanthropic donation system, Becker said, with a fundraiser scheduled in December. 

“Once it’s funded, we’ll keep running, then the question is, will we be able to expand it to other communities,” he said. “And if we can show really great success … this is actually a really super cost-effective way to treat vulnerable populations, populations who are really underserved by our health care community.” 

The bill began as the winner of the state Senate District 13 “There Ought to be a Law” contest, which helps to elevate the ideas of everyday Californians into legislation. Aisha Baro, executive director of Life Science Cares Bay Area, proposed the idea after her organization worked with the ALAS equity express. 

For Baro, the success of the equity express isn’t just its function as a mobile health unit, but that the service group running it is in tune with the community and able to bring a variety of wraparound services that farmworkers might need, at a time when they can use them. 

“The trust, the care, the cultural competency, the mental health, the arts all of it — ALAS is a big part of the success, the fact that this mobile health unit is delivered by a trusted organization that speaks the language,” she said. 

Crystal Springs Uplands School student David Liu is also working through Becker’s office on how the bill could be implemented, and said he was impressed by the focus on mental health.

Now, this legislation — which was born from a San Mateo County idea and has been worked on by a variety of residents — has become law. 

“We try something, if we can prove it out, great, we scale it up,” Becker said. “And that’s what we’re hoping to do.”