How the Health Care Council Benefits the Residents of Orange County

The Health Care Council of Orange County was founded in 1986 as the Health Care Task Force. Incorporated in 1994, the Council became a 501(c)(3) non-profit, public benefit corporation in February of 1997. The Council is a free-standing independent community-based coalition of organizations and individuals concerned about health care and is funded entirely by grants, service contracts and contributions.

The mission of the Health Care Council is to promote access to improved health care for all Orange County residents through unified efforts to identify and address areas of need through research, collaboration, education and advocacy.

This urban county of three million people has almost 500,000 residents who lack health insurance. More than half are Hispanic and 80% are low-income “working poor” people.  There is a substantial Hispanic population and a majority of  residents  in  ten Orange County cities is foreign-born.  Our Vietnamese population in Little Saigon is the largest concentration of Vietnamese outside Vietnam. Although a wealthy county, Orange County has no public hospital and not a single county-operated primary care clinic, and the county spends less per capita on health care and social services than any other California county.

A Coalition of more than one hundred Orange County organizations and people concerned about individual, family and community health, the Council is in its 21st year, and has a track record of developing coalitions and being at the forefront in dealing with a series of health system crises that has repeatedly beset this county. The Council seeks to bring coordination among Orange Country health care providers to a higher  level  by  bringing  people together to seek solutions to the problems of the health care system.

The Council administers an Area Health Education Center (AHEC) contract to support the training of culturally competent health professionals. In 1997 the Council began to develop an Action Plan to repair the fragile health care safety net.  Subsequently a number of programs were launched, including the following:

• Helping to develop the CalOPTIMA program which contracts for all MediCal services in the county, and is the largest such program in the nation.  It provides health care to one fifth of all Orange County residents.
• Helping to develop the Orange County Immunization Coalition, with the goal of reducing the numbers of children who remain unprotected against communicable childhood diseases, as well as  the Health Care Needs Assessment Program.
• Working with employers of low-paid workers and community organizations to help families to obtain health insurance for their children, reducing the number of uninsured Orange County children.
• Campaigning to ensure passage of Measure H to utilize tobacco settlement revenues for health care, withstanding the Board of Supervisors’ Measure G and their intent to use the funds to build jail cells and pay off the bankruptcy debt.
• Conducting a year-long campaign to bring public attention to the issue of the University of California, Irvine Medical Center management’s negotiations with Tenet and Columbia Health Care Corporations to lease the medical center to a private organization. We held town meetings around the county and testified before the Regents of the University of California.  This proposal was finally dropped, ensuring that UCI/MC would continue as a  vital part of the health care safety net.
• Helping to save the baccalaureate nursing education program at California State University, Fullerton which had been threatened with closure by the administration, addressing the full academic senate where we received a unanimous vote to retain the program, which is now fully funded and successful.
• Developing “Caring Connections,” a much-needed home visitation program for fragile older adults and persons with disabilities, a program now carried out by the Council on Aging.
• Participating in and promoting community-wide discussions regarding recurring hospital crises, including issues related to sales of four Tenet hospitals, state-imposed nurse-to-patient ratios, seismic retrofitting costs, overcrowded emergency rooms, and  critically needed access to health care services by underserved populations, and
• Continuing to support minority nursing education to combat the looming nursing shortage and improve access to health care for Orange County’s underserved minority populations.

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