More than 85,000 of California’s most vulnerable low-income residents, including those who are homeless and have been recently incarcerated, are now enrolled in a pilot project designed to link health care to social services.
Author: Ron Shinkman
Many counties already offered free rides, but they were rarely used. A new state law requiring free transportation is connecting many more low-income Californians to care.
Called “Food is Medicine,” a new Los Angeles pilot program aims to keep low-income patients with congestive heart failure out of the hospital. The three-year pilot project is being funded by the state of California to the tune of $6 million.
A joint committee of lawmakers unanimously ordered an audit Wednesday on children’s access to primary-care doctors in the Medi-Cal program, the state’s low-income heath program that is overseen by the California Department of Health Care Services.
“We are particularly concerned about children of color facing health disparities that could be perpetuated and/or exacerbated by poor monitoring and oversight,” Assemblyman Jim Wood and Sen. Anthony Cannella wrote in a letter to the audit committee.
The penalties were made public earlier this year but received little attention, though they were the first issued by the agency for privacy breaches since 2016. The California Department of Public Health rarely publicizes patient privacy violations, even though they are often accompanied by fines that dwarf those for medical errors that endanger the lives of patients.
The number of dental providers willing to treat Medi-Cal enrollees has decreased significantly in recent years, according to testimony state officials provided last week to the Hoover Commission, an independent state oversight agency.
Despite a recent expansion of benefits and boost in payments, Denti-Cal enrollees and their advocates say they are struggling to find dentists willing to see them.
These 7 million Californian adults are part of the state’s second-tier dental system, where participating dentists are few and far between, particularly in rural regions.
California’s transgender population is small, but much more vulnerable to poor mental health and other chronic health conditions than residents as a whole, according to a new study.
The California Department of Managed Health Care has sent an unequivocal message to the health insurers it regulates: paying for the health care of transgender policy holders is mandatory. That message came from the California Department of Managed Health Care (DMHC) in the form of a $200,000 fine against Woodland Hills-based insurer Health Net last month.
One of California’s most substantial voices to weigh in on the consequences of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t a consumer activist, politician or economist. It was the state’s health insurance exchange. Almost immediately after Donald Trump was sworn in as President, Covered California started issuing a series of reports detailing how the state’s residents would either lose their insurance or be left