Latino Profiles
The Molina Family in Molina Healthcare, Inc.
Molina Healthcare is a Fortune 500, multi-state health care organization, started and still thriving in Long Beach. According to the company’s website, it “arranges for the delivery of health care services and offers health information management solutions to nearly five million individuals and families who receive their care through Medicaid, Medicare and other government-funded programs in fifteen states”.
Dr. C. David Molina founded the company in 1980 to address the special needs of low-income patients. It was a family affair back then and in many ways, it still is. Dr. David Molina’s wife, Mary, and their four children, Mario, John, Martha, Janet and Josephine, joined him in the start-up. Dr. Molina died in 1996 and his wife, Mary, passed in 2012. Today, three of the children remain active in the management of the company that bears their name, Molina Healthcare.
Dr. C. David Molina
The Molina Family
PalacioMagazine.com interviewed all five of Dr. C. David Molina’s children and we will share their stories over the next several weeks.
Molina Healthcare, The Company
Molina Healthcare is #201 on the Fortune 500 list. The company has grown from $100 million in revenue in 1996 to $14.18 billion today. Dr. J. Mario Molina led the company through a successful initial public offering in 2003, making Molina Healthcare a publicly traded company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Dr. J. Mario Molina is President and Chief Executive Officer of Molina Healthcare. After his father’s death in 1996, Dr. Molina assumed leadership of Molina Healthcare, keeping alive the tradition of its commitment to physician management.
Education and Family
Dr. Molina remembers the family values that drive him and his siblings. “Hard work was always expected in our family,” Dr. Molina told PalacioMagazine.com in an interview. His parents placed a big importance on education.
“So everyone was expected to go to school. Everyone was expected to go to college.”
For Dr. Molina, education came in many forms. It wasn’t just from school. “I was a reader and I learned, probably in high school, that I was never able to experience or learn all the things that I wanted to do but that I could do a lot of that through reading.”
For the doctor and corporate executive, reading at an early age sent his mind soaring. “I could visit other countries. I could benefit from other people’s experiences. So that’s something that stayed throughout my life.”
Reading, curiosity, and wanting to know more were drivers for his life then and now. “Not depending on someone to feed me but to go out and find it for myself.”
J. Mario Molina, MD
The Many Lessons of Growing Up Molina
Molina also remembers another important lesson. “You shouldn’t expect to be rewarded for doing something good. You did the right thing because it was the right thing to do.”
For Dr. Molina, the lesson of hard work has had a lasting impact on him. “My father worked really hard. I don’t know of anyone that worked harder than my father,” he proudly boasted.
“My mother believed that you sort of took life as it came. She was never one to complain. When things didn’t go her way, she would just shift gears and she would find a way to make things work.”
In 2005, Dr. Molina was featured in Time magazine as one of the 25 most influential Hispanics in America. He is a member of the boards of the California Medical Association Foundation, Homeboy Industries, America’s Health Insurance Plans and the Aquarium of the Pacific. He is also a trustee of Johns Hopkins Medicine and served on the Visiting Committee for the Harvard Medical School and the Harvard Dental School.
The Molina Legacy
But for all the honors, the Molina Healthcare executive has thoughts about the Molina legacy. “My father always believed that everyone deserved access to high quality healthcare regardless of their ability to pay.”
The legacy that Dr. Molina would like to pass on is “…that more people have access to healthcare as a result of what we have done and the business that my parents founded.”
Dr. Molina was born and raised in Long Beach. He went to school here. “I’ve always wanted to give back. This community created me, in a sense, and I want to return the favor by helping and making Long Beach a better place to live and a better place for people to raise a family.”
For more information on Molina Healthcare, visit their website HERE.
