Having the same last name as the company you work for may be seen as a blessing by some, but brothers J. Mario Molina, M.D., and John Molina, J.D., now that it can also be a curse.

As President and CEO of Molina Healthcare, Dr. J. Mario Molina, son of Dr. C. David Molina, the founder of the company, admits that “the biggest negative is that sometimes because it is a family business people don’t take you as seriously.”

John Molina, the company’s Executive Vice President of Financial Affairs and Chief Financial Officer, agrees: “I remember during our time when we were trying to get people to invest in the company, despite the fact that we had a 23-year track record, people always questioned if we had staying power.”

As one of the leading and fastest-growing publicly-traded managed health care companies, Molina Healthcare, Inc. (NYSE: MOH) projects annual revenues of $1.6 billion for this year. Their presence in Southern California has been steadily growing for 20 years, beginning with their three healthcare clinics in the South Bay area of Los Angeles (one was in Wilmington and two in Long Beach, which is also where their current headquarter base is). Within the past few years, the company has grown astronomically; they now serve 800,000 members nationwide and have 21 care clinics in California. Molina Healthcare, Inc. also now has health plans available in Utah, Michigan, Washington and New Mexico. (At the time of this interview the company was in the process of obtaining their HMO license in Indiana.)

As the company was expanding, the Molina brothers contemplated changing the name of their business because they felt that the name would not mean anything to patients outside of Los Angeles.

“We decided we wanted the name Molina Healthcare out there because we wanted people to know that we really stand behind the company,” says J. Mario Molina, adding with a chuckle, “It’s funny, sometimes people will say, ‘Oh, there really is a Dr. Molina?’”

C. David Molina is the patriarch behind one of todays most successful Hispanic-owned companies. Twenty years ago, he envisioned starting a medical practice to specifically treat the neediest of all: low-income patients.

“He was working in the emergency room and seeing people who did not have a regular doctor that they could go to often because they were Medicaid patients,” J. Mario Molina recalls.

His idea was not an instant success; he constantly received negative feedback and criticism from medical colleagues. In fact, he had to overcome the initial obstacle of finding specialty physicians who would accept referrals for his Medicaid patients.

John Molina says, “Doctors were reluctant to deal with Medicaid patients because of low reimbursement rates and because of the paperwork involved. And back in the early days, there was a misconception that the Medicaid population was seen as more litigious than the average population.”

Nevertheless, Molina Senior pressed on, even to the point of mortgaging the home which housed his wife and five children when he needed capital for the fledging business.

“He felt there was a need to provide care to people who were low-income, who were getting their healthcare paid through government programs like Medicaid, and who just didn’t have access to a family doctor or pediatrician,” J. Mario Molina says.

According to their website (www.molinahealthcare.com), Molina Healthcare, Inc. is “among the most experienced managed healthcare compares serving patients who have traditionally faced barriers to quality healthcare–including individuals covered under Medicaid, the Healthy Families Program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and other government-sponsored health insurance programs.”

To put the concept of managed healthcare in simple terms, Molina Healthcare, Inc. essentially receives a fixed amount per month to provide or arrange for all of a patient’s healthcare needs.

Says Dr. Joseph Molina: “A lot of times people don’t know where to go or what to do, they have difficulty, finding specialists when they need specialty care. They don’t have someone they can call in the middle of the night when they have a problem. Our job is to try and coordinate the whole healthcare system so they get what they need, including preventive healthcare services, in a timely manner and [that they] don’t get lost in the system.”

Caring for Low-Income Patients

Another important reason for starting Molina Healthcare was to provide low-income families with direct medical access.

“My father wanted to have doctors that patients could go to in their own neighborhoods not build a huge medical center and expect people to drive twenty or thirty miles for care,” John Molina says.

His brother adds: “We’ve always taken that approach. We’ve tried to have doctors that are either employees or that are contracted with us close to the patient.”