C.A.L.L.A.C.

Affiliated with the National League of Latin American Citizens

California League of Latin American Citizens

P.O. Box 433 Torrance CA 90508-0433 Tel: 213.787.5476 callac@janbtucker.com

November 15, 2011 Honorable Rep. Xavier Becerra 1226 Longworth House Washington, D.C. 20515 Honorable Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard 2330 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Honorable Rep. Kevin Mc Carthy 326 Cannon House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Honorable Representatives: Along with the Chairperson of our California Health Commission, I attended the recent California Latino Legislative Caucus Health Summit at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine at which a thorough and detailed analysis was presented of the issues surrounding the formation of regulations to define essential benefits under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In addition to serving as State Director of the California League of Latin American Citizens (CALLAC), I am currently a member of the Community Advisory Board for the Keck School of Medicine's Alzaheimers Disease Research Project (ADRP) and a past member of the International Association for Hospital Security. As a private investigator, many of my past and current clients have been hospitals and health care institutions. Through the work of our associated non-profits, including the organization Feeding & Teaching, our members have helped to provide non-profit and free health screenings to literally thousands of people who come to our free food distribution points. The people who attend are universally without health care coverage and have been found to have everything from undiagnosed diabetes to undiagnosed cancer. It is critical that essential benefits provide equivalent access to people who currently enjoy typical employee health care benefits under major group employer and union plans. There is little point to

diagnosing a disease like diabetes without the ability of the person to get the drugs needed to control and treat the symptoms. Aside from the fact that an individual cannot directly treat the illness of diabetes as just one example without medicine, collateral damage to others, whether or not they are insured, is preventable by treating the underlying illness and its side effects. For instance, since diabetes creates in many people an extreme danger of contracting infectious diseases such of staphlococcus outbreaks, the potential for contagion alone behooves the government to enable preventative treatment. Simply put, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure and will be cost effective for the taxpayers and society in general. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) has published an article demonstrating the statistical affect of raising the cost of drugs: the 2004 JAMA article (http://jama.amaassn.org/content/291/19/2344.abstract) reported finding evidence that doubling copayments could lead to a 17 percent increase in emergency room visits and 10 percent more hospitalizations among patients with diabetes, asthma, and gastric acid disease. For these and other reasons, I request that you support full funding to insure that all residents of the United States have reasonable and fair access to medicines and drugs that their physicians deem necessary and appropriate for treatment of their illnesses and to prevent further diseases from afflicting them. Respectfully Yours,

Jan B. Tucker