Healthcare With a Heart

Dr. J. Mario Molina is a proud, confident person, and why not?

As the president and chief executive officer of Molina Healthcare Inc., he heads a $1 billion publicly traded health maintenance organization that serves more than one million low-income patients in eight states. When U.S.News & World Report published a list of the nation’s top 50 Medicaid companies, five of the Molina Healthcare health plans made the list, more than any other company.

Still, he remains somewhat modest about his success.

When Molina, a 1980 CSULB alumnus with a B.S. in chemistry, got a call from someone in New York telling him that he was going to be recognized in Time magazine as one of the Top 25 Most Influential Hispanics in America, “I thought it was a joke,” he recalled. “I didn’t respond at first. It wasn’t until the second person called that I figured that it was some reporter wanting to do a story. Even after I did the interview, I wasn’t completely convinced that it was really legitimate, that it was really going to happen, and I halfway wondered if it wasn’t someone trying to sell me something.

“The guy interviewed me over the telephone from New York or someplace, and no photographer came out to take a picture,” he continued. “So, until you saw it in print, it was a little difficult to believe that it was really going to happen.”

It turned out to be the real thing, and when Molina actually saw it in print, “Wow,” he said. The article is hanging in a frame just outside his office, and it includes celebrities Jennifer Lopez and Salma Hayek and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa.

The article’s subhead reads: “From music to politics to business, Hispanics are remaking America. Time presents 25 titans leading the Latino charge into the 21st century.” Under Molina’s name, it gives him the moniker of “The Expert Caregiver.”

“It is a very nice honor. The recognition in Time magazine has probably given us a little higher profile. I think there was definitely some benefit,” Molina noted. “(It) helps legitimize what we have done—the mission of our company, the success we have and the role we play in the medical community. People recognize that we do something well and that we fill an important niche.”

Founded by his father in 1980, Molina Healthcare Inc. opened its first clinics to help patients on Medicaid who couldn’t find doctors willing to treat them for the limited fees paid through the government program. Molina, who also has an M.D. degree from USC, built on that clientele, employing bilingual physicians and providing easy-to-understand brochures in several languages.

Other family members are both CSULB alumni and corporate officers. His sister, Dr. Martha (Molina) Bernadett, executive vice president of research and development, received her B.A. in chemistry from Cal State Long Beach in 1985 and an M.D. from UC Irvine. Their brother, John C. Molina, is chief financial officer and earned his CSULB B.A. in economics in 1986 and a J.D. from USC. Although not with the firm, another sister, Janet Molina-Watt, is an alumna with a 1992 B.A. in family and consumer sciences.

“What we do is take care of low-income people, provide their healthcare, but we do it in a way that I think is respectful of them and their situation in life,” explained Molina, who began working for his father’s business in 1991 and took over the company in 1996, just after his father’s death. “Many of our patients don’t speak English; the ones who do speak English may not be able to read or write very well. Many of them have had minimal education, maybe they dropped out of high school to go to work, that sort of thing. And, they find themselves in difficult social situations, in part because they are poor.

“The whole idea (of this business) was to treat them like regular people. They deserve good health care just like everybody else, and that is the premise that my father started this company on— that just because you are poor doesn’t mean that you should get a different class of health care than everyone else,” he continued. “If you are the guy who works in the welding shop around the corner, you deserve to be treated the same way as the guy who is a CEO of some big corporation. All patients should be treated the same. He (also) believed not only should they be treated the same, they should be treated well. My father had a profound respect for his patients. He always wore a suit and tie to work, and I asked him about that once because not all of the doctors did, and he said that it is a mark of respect for your patients.”

It is a philosophy that continues to resonate with this patient population that can find the healthcare industry to be a daunting environment.

“I think we have good reason to be proud of what we have accomplished here, and it really is a team effort,” Molina noted. “As the CEO, I get a lot of the credit, but that’s because it is easy to identify and point to that one person. But it’s really a big organization with a lot of people working together, and one of the things that I think attracts people here is that sense of mission that we have.

“This is not a company that is about Wall Street first and to make money. No!” he pointed out. “We’re here to take care of the patients and build a really good organization, and along the way we are going to make money doing it. I think that sense of mission, that sense of purpose, attracts good people.”

— Rick Gloady