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.
Author: Chris Richard
A scourge in much of the world, tuberculosis has long been declining in this country. But TB has persisted among the homeless. And on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where close quarters and unsanitary conditions help spread the disease, it’s made an alarming advance.
Pressured by federal penalties for high readmissions, some California hospitals are revamping discharge procedures and assigning health coaches to monitor patients for up to a month after they’re disconnected from the hospitals’ high-tech monitors.
A federal policy that allows undocumented immigrants who entered the country as youth to remain in the U.S. also excludes them from health care under federal reform. But in California, these immigrants might get a break, thanks to a dispute between state officials and the federal government nearly two decades ago.
Health activists call for a new push focusing on allergens such as black mold and cockroach waste that they hold partially to blame for high asthma rates among children in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.
In a first step in a campaign to emphasize a moral and religious imperative in the state budget debate, clergy from a coalition of Los Angeles County churches and synagogues delivered sermons over last weekend calling on Gov. Jerry Brown to retain current state support for county indigent care.
As city planners consider lifting a five-year-old ban on new fast-food vendors in South Los Angeles, urban gardening activists say it’s especially important to promote healthy eating habits by planting publicly available produce gardens on front lawns and city parkways.
By the time national health-care reform takes effect next year, Los Angeles County health officials expect to enroll 300,000 people in an expanded Medi-Cal program. But some estimates put the number of people eligible for the low-income insurance coverage countywide at more than half a million. To help make up the difference, a coalition of churches, synagogues and nonprofits has launched an enrollment drive that invites people to sign up at the neighborhood church.
Just in time for the advent of national health care reform next year, Los Angeles-area schools are opening their first campus-based wellness centers, offering services not just to students and their families, but to entire neighborhoods.
After a shooter wounded two doctors at a Los Angeles County hospital in the 1990s, metal detectors were installed at county medical facilities. Now that Obamacare is poised to bring more choice to low-income patients, the county wants to remove the metal detectors, causing doctors, patients and other wonder about their safety.