One day soon, a student with a laptop in her bedroom in Mission Viejo will be able to take a full-credit, certified class online from a community college across the county. Or from Cal State Fullerton. Or UCLA. The student will watch the professor’s lectures on her computer, ask questions via email or text message, and take exams, probably from home. At least that’s the vision of Senate Leader Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who wants to use technology to bust the bottlenecks that are blocking student access in California’s cash-strapped and over-subscribed systems of higher education. Steinberg is vowing to get California’s public universities ahead of – or at least caught up with – a revolution underway in higher education while ensuring that the state continues to offer consistent, high quality classes, whether students take them on campus or over the Internet. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.
Month: March 2013
The day the north tower of the World Trade Centers fell into her office at Lehman Brothers world headquarters, Katy Thomas Fike’s world changed forever. Matt Perry’s latest column on aging with dignity.
As the US population ages in record numbers, home care workers are becoming part of an increasingly in-demand market. They make an independent life possible for thousands of seniors and people with disabilities, but in the Central Valley and elsewhere across California and the US, they’re barely scraping by themselves.
A change in the way depression is diagnosed in the bereaved – to be implemented in May by the American Psychiatric Association – could have a particular impact on older people.
As millions of Californians are projected to gain coverage over the next several years, the independent clinics that have traditionally served the uninsured are in for some big changes. Soon, many more low-income patients are expected to have private insurance, following the roll out of Obamacare’s signature reforms in 2014.
For decades, Los Angeles County has been a tumultuous demographic soup, with immigrants pouring in, longtime residents moving out, and the status quo turning upside down. The only thing that stayed the same was the pace of change. It was always fast.
But suddenly, the music stopped.
Immigration to Los Angeles has slowed to a crawl, relatively speaking. More of the county’s residents have lived there for decades instead of just a few years. A large cohort of second-generation Americans is rising to prominence. And for the first time since the Gold Rush, a majority of Los Angeles County will soon be homegrown, born in California rather than having arrived from another state or country. Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.
Santa Cruz County is home to an intriguing health care mystery: The county spends much less on acute long term care than most of the country. Can the rest of the U.S. learn from their example? And are they saving money without compromising patient care?
The CHMI recently released the Coachella Valley Blueprint for Action report, which was produced at a marathon brainstorming session in December by 125 local health-care experts. The blueprint aims to help people live longer, healthier lives – and it encompasses many factors, not just access to health care.
St. Anthony’s, a free clinic in San Francisco, has a long history, one that reveals decades of challenges in providing health care for the poor people who line up for the clinic’s help – challenges that likely won’t end when health care reform takes full effect in 2014.
If there is a modern mystic channeling Dylan Thomas’ famous poem “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night,” it would be Ashton Applewhite. The excitable New York writer and scholar is rattling the cages of ageism to counter prevailing attitudes that older adults are unhappy, unproductive, or even worthless.