Officials resist state-directed effort by Blue Shield to take over distribution duties in region
Los Angeles County officials are resisting health insurer Blue Shield of California’s state-directed effort to coordinate vaccine distribution across the board.
Public health officials said Tuesday they met with company representatives last week and that until their concerns are met, the county will continue to administer the network it spent weeks building.
“Public Health will continue to play a lead role because we are the local government entity tasked with vaccination in the county,” Department of Public Health
Director Barbara Ferrer told the county Board of Supervisors during a public meeting Tuesday. “We will continue to work with the state and Blue Shield to work with our providers who have capacity and experience to not only give vaccines in the hardest-hit community but to ramp up vaccine distribution.”
Later, Ferrer said she wasn’t comfortable with the arrangements Blue Shield has suggested.
“I’m really comfortable with our provider network and the people we work with on the ground,” she said. “Those are the people I rely on the most when I think about how to solve problems of equity for a scarce good.”
Fifth District Supervisor Kathryn Barger said she, too, was not confident in what the health insurer had put forward so far.
“I don’t think they understand or want to understand” what’s happening in our communities, Barger
Charles Spurlin gets his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine from EMT Valeria Montes at St. Mark Baptist Church in Long Beach on Feb. 10 during a mobile vaccine clinic.
said.
And last week, board Chair and 1st District Supervisor Hilda Solis and 2nd District Supervisor Holly Mitchell penned a letter to the state asking to be exempted from the Blue Shield plan. The letter cited a host of concerns, including a separate deal for Kaiser Permanente that allows the medical giant its own flow of vaccines.
“The above mentioned concerns are coupled with the fact that all county
communications with Blue Shield thus far have not demonstrated they have an adequate understanding of the unique needs and features of Los Angeles County, its diverse population, and where our residents go for health care,” states the letter sent March 2 to Newsom’s office.
L.A. County is not alone in its reluctance to fall in line with a strategy championed by Gov. Gavin Newsom after many counties had already formulated their own distribution plans. So far, none of the state’s 58 counties have signed contracts with the health insurance giant. State officials want to switch over to Blue Shield by the end of March and to get several counties signed up by this week.
“Everyone is worried about the same things,” Health Services Director Dr. Christina Ghaly said. “L.A. County is not alone. People are worried about the system set up, that it’s not far enough along to guarantee that the gains being made would not be reversed under this new system.”
A network already exists in L.A. County with more than 400 providers capable of administering vaccine doses with capacity to administer far more doses than the state and federal government are supplying them with now.
At issue with the stateordered plan are two primary concerns, county officials said:
• Blue Shield requires what officials claim is burdensome record keeping. Providers already must enter vaccine information into immunization registries at the federal and state levels. But under Blue Shield’s plan, providers would need to enter that information into a third database, the state’s My Turn website, which L.A. officials say is unnecessary.
“The issue is let’s not add any bureaucratic layers to the work we are doing and make sure that we are appropriately supporting our smallest providers,” Ferrer said.
• Blue Shield’s projected plan to reward or punish certain providers for not meeting established goals could actually set back efforts the county has made to reach the most vulnerable, local officials fear.
“I’m not one to put up measurements for performance when you know the playing field isn’t level,” Ferrer said. “I wouldn’t want to be penalizing anybody based on some performance metric. I really want to be helping everybody in the hardest hit areas meet standards.”
The vaccination distribution network in L.A. County has capacity for more than 600,000 doses per week, but this week received 312,000. Roughly 48,000 doses will be administered at mobile clinics.
While the state has set a goal of administering roughly 40% of vaccine doses in areas that fall in the bottom quartile of socioeconomic status, L.A. County officials said they were now fulfilling that mark by 50%.
Large efforts have been made to narrow the disparities that officials noted when reviewing who was receiving the coronavirus vaccine in L.A. County. The data showed that Black people and Latino people were receiving fewer vaccine doses by percentage compared with White people and Asian people.
Armies of volunteers and case workers — together with local clinics, popup sites and mobile units — have fanned out across some of the hardest-hit areas of the county to inform residents about vaccines and, in many cases, help secure their appointments.
As of this week, L.A. County had administered more than 2.4 million doses.