Budget-strapped California is aggressively moving its poorest residents to managed health care, whether they're seniors, rural residents or people with disabilities.

So when Gov. Jerry Brown proposed earlier this year to transfer the nearly 900,000 poor children in the Healthy Families insurance program into Medi-Cal, he saw it as another opportunity to reduce costs by expanding dental managed care.

But something happened between then and now - and that was Sacramento County.

Sacramento's poor-performing Medi-Cal dental managed care program foiled Brown's plans, legislators say.

"That failure certainly has stopped the expansion of dental managed care," said Assemblyman Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat who also is a pediatrician.

"Hopefully, we as a state have learned from that failure, and not only on the dental side.

"Hopefully, we can apply those lessons on the medical side."

Sacramento joins Los Angeles as the only two counties with Medi-Cal dental managed care.

Their lackluster performance getting poor children into dentists made legislative leaders balk at adding Healthy Families kids to Medi-Cal dental managed care.

Instead Sen. President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg of Sacramento and Assembly Speaker John P rez of Los Angeles negotiated a deal to move Healthy Families kids into the more flexible - and potentially more expensive - "fee-for-service" dental care model under Medi-Cal, interrupting the state's seemingly

Original post:

Brown's plan to expand dental care stumbles