By Daniel Weintraub California probably gained more than any other state from the Affordable Care Act, the federal health reform better known as Obamacare. Now, with the program facing almost certain demise, the state and its low-income residents have the most to lose. President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have pledged to repeal Obamacare and then replace it with something better. No
Month: December 2016
Aging services in California are often hamstrung by dysfunction and uninspired leadership. To understand the problem, look no further than Alameda County’s top aging official.
Having just bought a dozen or so quart-bottles of sports drinks – a riot of reds, yellows and blues wedged in the front of his shopping cart — Luis Gregorio Ruiz almost made it out of an Anaheim grocery store on a recent morning. But not quite. Maureen Villasenor, a physician in a white coat with a friendly manner, hustled over to Ruiz and introduced herself to him to chat about healthy drink choices.
Only a quarter of young children enrolled in California’s low-income health program receive preventative dental care — a statistic that state officials and advocates are urgently trying to change.
L.A. is on the road toward a transportation revolution. It’s been a slow start but with a new, well-utilized Expo Rail line extension stretching from Downtown L.A. to the beach and more lines under construction, many of L.A.’s famously car-loving citizens are navigating in new ways.
Four years after California legislators vowed to eliminate racially and ethnically-linked disparities in spending on services to the developmentally disabled, funding gaps persist, records show. The state’s 21 “regional centers,” nonprofit organizations tasked with providing services for people with developmental disabilities, consistently spend less on Latinos than on whites, African-Americans or Asians.
As professional sports teams assess concussion rates, pediatricians are calling on parents and coaches to take a closer look at children’s participation in sports that frequently cause contact injuries.
Nearly a third of California teens who were bullied later report serious psychological distress, a new study has found. About 30 percent of California teens who were victims of bullying reported that they were depressed, anxious or had other serious psychological distress in the months after, according to the report, published in the peer-reviewed California Journal of Health Promotion in October. Researchers found that teens
By Daniel Weintraub In the days following Donald Trump’s election as president, progressive activists on a number of issues – from health care to education and the environment – said they were preparing to fight against an expected attempt to roll back everything they’d worked so hard to achieve during the Obama Administration. But at a post-election gathering in Sacramento of transportation policy experts from
Ron Robinson was ahead of his time. As California struggles to implement the Coordinated Care Initiative to improve the health of some of its most expensive patients – “dual eligibles” who qualify for both Medicare and Medi-Cal — Robinson recalls similar efforts in San Mateo County two decades ago.