In rural California, traumatic injuries often happen hours away from medical services. Rescuers scramble helicopters or ground ambulances to rush victims of car crashes, major accidents or violence to hospitals outside of the region. Occasionally, those expensive trips to life saving aid are waylaid by weather or traffic.
Agricultural businesses and the insurance companies that serve them are scrambling to prepare for the changes that health care reform will bring over the next few years.
One in five young people on the streets in Monterey County are at increased risk for mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, sexual exploitation and suicide.
Forecasting the impact of the Affordable Care Act requires researchers to head into the unknown.
Monterey County, which operates a safety-net hospital and has a constrained budget, wasn’t sure it could afford to back the insurance plan and lose federal cash it receives for treating low-income, uninsured adults at Natividad Medical Center, the county hospital.
Tracking down Monterey County residents who become eligible for free or discounted health insurance under federal health care reform might take an army. But an army is not what the county will get.
When students start school in the Salinas Valley town of Bradley, they bring with them with pens, paper and notebooks. The school district provides their water bottles. That is because tap water in this south Monterey County school is undrinkable. It’s contaminated with dangerously high levels nitrates.
Monterey County wants to revolutionize health care for one of the most difficult to reach groups, the mentally ill. Its new program will create one-stop health care shopping for people whose main interaction with doctors is through the county’s behavioral health centers.
The federally funded program known as Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, is better known for providing food stamps to needy families, but it also encourages mothers to breastfeed through support and peer counseling. In Salinas, the Monterey County program has zeroed in on farmworkers who are new moms.