A slew of new medications to treat the hepatitis C virus entered the market last year, promising that just about anyone with the disease can be cured. The medications were a groundbreaking development, especially for older patients who’ve suffered through earlier, less effective treatments, only to have the disease return.
Michael Williams, who has cerebral palsy, has seen the same network of doctors for decades under two government health plans. But on May 1, California began an initiative that will change the way he and 460,000 other low-income patients get care.
In an article published Monday, I wrote about the policy decisions that contributed to the massive Medi-Cal backlog. Through interviews and state documents, we revealed that the state prioritized Covered California’s insurance enrollment system over one for Medi-Cal, leading to a backlog of about 900,000 applications from low-income people.
Less than one per cent of healthy urban children surveyed in Toronto had received dental care by the recommended age of 12 months and less than two per cent had seen a dentist by the age of 24 months, according to a recent study by researchers at St Michael’s Hospital. The study findings have importance for the United States because, like the U.S., patients must generally pay privately for dental insurance.
Today, almost one in five women and one in 71 men in the U.S. experience sexual assault throughout their lifetimes, according to CDC data. In California, over 2 million women are survivors of rape—and the majority of these victims haven’t reported their attacks. But for victims who live in communities with Sexual Assault Response Teams (SART), the experience of reporting a rape and seeking help yields a network of support.
About 25 percent of parents who have children aged two to five say their children get three or more hours of entertainment screen time a day, well beyond recommended limits, according to a new poll of over 500 parents of kids age 1 to 5 by researchers from the University of Michigan.
As more and more health-related services use the web to interact with patients, consumers are increasingly vulnerable to health care fraud.
May 6 marks World Asthma Day, and it also marks the release of a major study on climate, the National Climate Assessment. The timing may be coincidental, but the connection isn’t: climate change represents a major new threat to health and is already contributing to increases in asthma around the globe. California has much to do to protect the health and environments of its residents.
As they scrambled to open the insurance gates to millions of Californians under the federal health law, state officials prioritized the open-marketplace enrollment system over one for low-income residents, according to state documents and officials.
A review of more than 25,000 hospital admissions in Rhode Island finds that patients with a documented diagnosis of dementia are nearly 20 percent more likely to be readmitted within 30 days than those without dementia.