Month: January 2013

Is the ACA the road to semi-single payer?

As the full implementation of the Affordable Care Act approaches, the most important question might be this: how are employers going to react? Early indications suggest that many companies — and perhaps even unions — will drop coverage for workers and send them to the newly created, subsidized insurance exchanges instead. Eventually, this could create a series of defacto single-payer plans.

Poll: 55 percent support health reform in California

A record-high number of Californians now support the Affordable Care Act — President Barack Obama’s federal health reform plan, according to a new independent poll.

The survey, by the Public Policy Institute of California, also found the highest support ever for a plan to allow undocumented immigrants to become legal U.S. residents.

Impact of receding Salton Sea unknown

The Salton Sea is shrinking, making it shallower and more susceptible to events such as the Big Stink. But while the hydrogen sulfide can be dismissed as more of an inconvenience than a hazard, a greater threat may be looming.

Too early to judge prison reform

By Daniel Weintraub Film at eleven. Those three words became a part of our language thanks to local television news, which employed them to tease viewers into staying up late to see footage of the latest grisly crime scene. And that sensational crime coverage, in turn, has kept many Californians in the dark about just how much safer their streets are today than they were

The Difference Between Poverty and Mental Illness

Judith Baer is worried about how poor people, especially poor mothers, are labeled with diagnoses of mental health problems. Once a teenage mother, today she is a professor who understands the anxiety that comes with poverty— and she wants the diagnostic manual to reflect that kind of understanding, too.

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