Medi-Cal Access Program

AIM was first introduced in 1992, and provided for 3,000-4,000 women annually initially. It is difficult to assess the impact of AIM as it was introduced alongside many other maternal healthcare improvement policies including increasing the eligibility limit for Medi-Cal from 110% to 200% of the federal poverty line, and extending Medi-Cal to undocumented foreign-born women. However, these programs were able to reduce the number of uninsured pregnant mothers from 13.2% in 1989 to under 3% in the mid-1990s.^[2][3]

The AIM program was initially administered by the J.P. Kennedy company of Pasadena, California, under a contract with the State of California. Enrollment, eligibility verification, and payment of benefits was managed by custom software developed by Montgomery Ryland, Inc., a Fountain Valley, CA-based healthcare and health insurance information management company. The software, written in COBOL, was run on an IBM AS/400 midrange computer, and during its first year of service was maintained and enhanced by a single developer/analyst, Jim Rothwell, a former Montgomery-Ryland employee who was later contracted by J.P. Kennedy to provide on-going support for the software system.

• Welfare in California
• Medi-Cal