We just received the ruling in Maternal Child Health Access v. Maxwell-Jolly, granting our peremptory writ on the largest part of the relief we were seeking.  Bottom line, about 200,000 kids a year were not being evaluated for the full Medi-Cal program when they applied by mail, and now the portion of them who we think would actually benefit from the screening and get free benefits must be evaluated instead of being put into Healthy Families that gives them less services at a higher cost (or in some cases, denied altogether). 

The case challenged the state's failure to evaluate children's joint applications for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families for all of Medi-Cal's programs when they applied by sending them by mail to the state's centralized processing center.  These kids were only evaluated for one Medi-Cal program and for Healthy Families, which provides a narrower scope of benefits at some cost.  By contrast, a child who applies at the county welfare office gets evaluated for all of Medi-Cal, including all available income deductions.