Most mornings, 90-year-old Joe Capra drives his Cadillac around town to local bakeries and coffee spots and delivers the goodies to the hospitality center at Leisure World that opens every day at 9am. The spry Capra, who has lived in the sprawling retirement community in Orange County town of Seal Beach for 13 years, was recently recognized for logging about 3,500 hours of picking up breakfast treats for his fellow residents.
California’s population is aging, but most older adults underestimate how likely they are to need help with daily living as they grow older, and few are prepared to handle the potential cost, which can be huge. This disconnect has implications not only for individuals, who risk being left penniless and still needing care, but also for the government and for taxpayers, who eventually will have to pay for nursing homes for people whose medical and long-term care bills leave them impoverished.
A UC Davis professor is pushing the field of architecture in a new direction. Instead of designing new structures, Michael Rios asks his students to try re-imagining structures that already exist. The designs they have responded with range from converting the underbelly of a freeway in a run-down neighborhood into a shadow garden to designing affordable housing out of freight containers in a mobile park. Rios is trying to show that there is a place for social entrepreneurship in architecture: designing with a focus on social capital and human capital, rather than focusing on capital itself.
One county drops a service and another county picks up the slack. It’s happening between Fresno and Kern counties when it comes to care for mentally ill patients in crisis. Two years ago, Fresno County shut down its mental health crisis stabilization unit, blaming high operating costs. Patients released after the closure ended up back in the hospital – this time in the ER under an involuntary medical hold. Fresno emergency rooms were ill-equipped to handle mental health issues, and hospitals shipped them off to Kern County for psychiatric crisis treatment.
Californians suffering from chronic disease -– anything from diabetes to hypertension -– are increasingly getting more attention from their doctors and other health care workers, who are using a new team-based approach to engage patients in managing their own health. The goal is to keep people healthier and save money — for the patients and their families, the health care industry and the taxpayers.
Eleven thousand Monterey County residents are expected to be eligible for healthcare benefits under the Bridge to Reform program, according to an estimate by the UCLA Center for Public Health Research. But the county can only afford to insure 1,000 to 1,500 of them this year, even though the federal government will match its spending dollar for dollar.
Bill Nissley is growing older. At 57, he still leads an active life – traveling, teaching tennis to budding young players, conversing in five languages with whomever he can find. But Nissley is growing older, and that in itself is astounding.
At a time when obesity is overtaking smoking as the leading cause of preventable illness in the United States, healthy food financing initiatives seem like a reasonable solution to a difficult problem. And the obesity crisis hits poor people the hardest. About 35 percent of people with incomes of less than $15,000 struggle with obesity, compared to 24 percent of people with incomes above $50,000. Access to fresh food in poor neighborhoods, Obama and other fresh food financing advocates say, could set a generation of low-income kids on the path to good health.
For some, summer camp brings to mind canoeing on a mountain lake, hiking and roasting hotdogs and marshmallows over an open fire. Today for many children in cities such as Los Angeles, summer camp provides a different experience, as kids fill school classrooms and playgrounds during the months when school’s out. Activities typically include arts and crafts, field trips, games and for some urban campers, learning about healthy eating choices.
One of the very first provisions of national health care reform to take effect was a rule barring insurance companies from limiting or denying coverage for a child due to a “pre-existing condition,” a health problem that developed before the child applied for insurance. Now, some health care scholars and activists say it’s time to extend that principle to what they call another kind of pre-existing condition that makes children especially vulnerable: immigration status.