When Ema Rowe found out that she was pregnant with her third child, her physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center referred the South Los Angeles resident to Eisner Pediatric & Family Medical Center. Rowe soon entered Eisner’s centering pregnancy program at the clinic’s main location in downtown Los Angeles. A nurse called her after noticing she had been a little depressed at a recent centering pregnancy class.
Elizabeth Luciano sits in her small office looking compassionately at the young mother complaining of stomach pain. She was undocumented and had no health insurance. They met at a community event a week before and the woman cautiously approached Luciano to see if she knew of anyone who could help with her Medi-Cal application. Luciano, a former hospital nutritionist in her home country of Columbia, told her it was safe to come to her office at the Pittsburg Health Center.
With all Americans required to enroll in health insurance under the Affordable Care Act, will the existing safety net clinics become a thing of the past?
For millions of Californians who buy health insurance on their own – and even for many who get it through work – the Affordable Care Act will change almost everything about the experience. The federal health reform law completely upends the business model of private insurance companies, changing their incentives and, very likely, the way they deal with customers. Under current law, which goes away on Jan. 1, insurance companies make money by minimizing their risk, and they do that by screening out potential customers who might actually need the product the insurance companies are selling. Using questionnaires and detailed interviews about a person’s medical history, insurers decide who is most likely to get sick. If you are one of those people, you will probably not be offered coverage. If you do get a chance to buy a policy, it will be priced at a level you will almost certainly not find affordable. But in a few months that will no longer be the case.
When Bob Woodward helped expose the tawdry secrets of the Nixon administration during the Watergate crisis, the Washington Post journalist relied heavily on a background source he met in a secretive D.C. parking structure: Deep Throat.
As a journalist new to covering aging issues for the California Health Report two years ago, I found my own Deep Throat located right in my backyard of Sacramento, a source who helped guide me through those early days of exploration.
As state-ordered testing of the soil around a battery recycling plant gets underway in a low-income neighborhood just east of downtown Los Angeles, activists say they already know what the tests will show.