Marina Owen may be the most important person on the Central Coast nobody ever heard of. Maybe not even Governor Gavin Newsom. That may be about to change.
For the past five years, Owen has run the organization responsible for connecting members of the single largest healthcare plan on the Central Coast — one of three residents of Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo counties are members — with their healthcare providers. Owen is Executive Director of CenCal Health, an outfit that connects 240,000 Medi-Cal enrollees with doctors and specialists in two counties. People on Medi-Cal don’t make a lot of money. It’s limited to people who don’t. About two-thirds of CenCal’s members are Latino. Maybe half speak Spanish at home. Right now, 38,000 are what’s referred to as “UIS,” or Unsatisfactory Immigration Status. Given the political climate, perhaps a more fitting acronym would be SOL.
This Tuesday, Owen was flying to Sacramento to share her thoughts about Governor Gavin Newsom’s revised budget plan and its impact on people designated UIS. Statewide, Owen points out, there are no fewer than two million UIS residents who will be adversely affected by the governor’s budget proposal. Owen is going as a representative of what’s known as the Stakeholders Advisory Committee for the Department of Health Care Services. (“They run Medi-Cal,” Owen says by way of explanation.) Accompanying her will be NAACP’s Lawanda Pruitt-Lyons and Promotores’s Mary Ellen Reese. Together, they will be meeting with members of the State Assembly and State Senate. There’s about $1.5 billion in Medi-Cal pain in what President Donald Trump calls his “Big Beautiful Budget,” but right now, Owen is focused on the $538 million worth of pain about to befall the state’s UIS population.