The lack of dentists and specialists in rural Californian counties is leading to high rates of tooth decay and preventable dental emergencies, especially among low-income residents.
Author: Callie Shanafelt
Roughly three million poor and disabled Californians had their coverage for dental services cut three years ago, and community dental clinics have struggled to cover preventative services ever since.
By the time children in California reach kindergarten half of them already have cavities. More than a quarter of them have untreated tooth decay. Among poor children and children of color the numbers are even worse. Seventy-two percent of children on free and reduced lunch have cavities and a third have untreated tooth decay.
The Oakland Unified School District wants to be the first major urban school district in the nation to guarantee universal access to primary health care to all its students – and it’s well on its way to accomplishing that goal this year.
Since the mid-eighties, the pool of traditional foster families has been shrinking. Child welfare agencies started looking to relatives or people connected to the family as guardians as an alternative to foster parents. Today, more than a third of foster kids in California are in kinship care.
When Sherry Hirota learned that healthcare reform meant community clinics like hers – Asian Health Services in Oakland’s Chinatown – would be expected to double their capacity, she wasn’t surprised. And she wanted the clinic to serve as many patients as it could hold. There was just one problem – and it was a big one – the clinic was too small. Callie Shanafelt reports on how the clinic tacked the size problem, with some help from federal healthcare reform money.
California is the state with the highest number of seniors living below federal poverty levels, and half of all California workers will spend their final years in poverty if nothing changes with our retirement system. But women are particularly at risk for economic hardship because they generally live longer and earn less than men over the course of their lives.
Californians have less access to employer-sponsored retirement benefits than the rest of the nation. If something isn’t done to address retirement insecurity in California, a significant number of today’s workers are at risk for serious economic hardship in retirement.
Strokes are a leading cause of death – stroke victims need to be treated quickly to improve their chances of survival and decrease their chances of brain damage. California’s Department of Public Health is overseeing efforts to standardize stroke treatment across the state, but that can be a challenge, especially in rural areas.
Sen. Mark Leno is trying to get 20 of his fellow California state senators to vote in favor of his single-payer healthcare legislation this week. The proposed law, dubbed the “Medicare for All” bill, doesn’t look likely to pass. Yet the introduction of the bill raises an interesting question: why push for radical changes to insurance and healthcare so soon after President Obama signed historic reforms into law in March of 2010?