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Amerish Bera says he thought about making politics a career when he was growing up in La Palma, a small Orange County community not too far from Disneyland. At his parents' urging, he went into medicine, instead, and became a physician.
"And lo and behold," he said, "here I am today, involved with politics."
Dr. Bera is the medical director of Sacramento County's Primary Health Care system. Among his responsibilities are finding ways to provide healthcare for the more than 200,000 county residents who have no health insurance.
That means working with county, state, and federal funding sources; with the four healthcare systems in the county, UC Davis, Kaiser Permanente, Mercy Healthcare, and Sutter Healthcare, and with businesses and insurance companies, to find ways of providing healthcare for lowincome people and their families.
That means politicking.
His immediate management and political objective is to make a success of a county program aimed at dealing with the issue of the uninsured. It is called SacAdvantage, and it was launched Oct. 1.
BACKGROUND
* Age: 37
* Native of: La Palma
* Resident of: Elk Grove
* Education: B.S., biological sciences, UC Irvine; M.D.. UC Irvine: board certified in internal medicine, California Pacific Medical Center, San Francisco
* Family: Wife, Dr. Janine Bera; daughter Sydra, 5
BECOMING A MANAGER
First, a physician: "I still look at myself primarily as a physician. If I trace my career path and think about the reasons I went into medicine, the primary reason was that I wanted to help people. During training I discovered that I enjoyed working with systems, looking at how things are working.
"I think I've always had an interest in the political side of things. I can trace that back to high school. Medicine certainly trains you to interact with people, and how to look at a problem and come up with a plan in a very quick time frame. Those are skills I think are valuable on the administrative side."
Doctor, manager: "When my wife and I first moved to Sacramento I went into practice at the County Medical Clinic for about four years, and during that time was practicing half time and working as an administrator at Mercy half time as medical director of...