After a hearing in which justices strongly suggested their support for city and county discretion, patients and dispensary operators are bracing for the worst.
Author: Chris Richard
For decades, San Bernardino County has been a state leader in the statistics of despair: low educational attainment, high unemployment, low household income, low birth-weight babies, high pollution levels, inadequate health care. The baleful statistics mounted up, but policy makers had no uniform way to bring them into a framework and chart their interactions. Now, a state agency is preparing a tool that will coalesce such indices in a color-coded map, one that highlights the communities that are most vulnerable to environmental health risks.
More than half a century after a partial nuclear meltdown near Los Angeles, a federal study has found ground radiation levels nearly 1,000 times higher than agreed-upon standards for mandatory cleanup.
Volunteers spend three days interviewing homeless people before dawn, when experience has shown they’re easiest to locate. Questions range from age and length of time on the street to whether a person has liver disease or HIV/AIDS to injuries related to cold weather. From that, the Harvard-designed survey seeks to extrapolate respondents’ health risk, and then find housing for the most vulnerable first.
California’s unprecedented Medicaid expansion in advance of national health care reform is a crucial opportunity to improve care for the homeless, advocates say. The $10 billion program, called California’s Bridge to Reform, includes increases in health care subsidies for the indigent, including the state’s estimated 134,000 homeless.
One of the very first provisions of national health care reform to take effect was a rule barring insurance companies from limiting or denying coverage for a child due to a “pre-existing condition,” a health problem that developed before the child applied for insurance. Now, some health care scholars and activists say it’s time to extend that principle to what they call another kind of pre-existing condition that makes children especially vulnerable: immigration status.
The Mojave Desert community of Hinkley is best known as the setting for the legal battle over chromium 6 contamination in groundwater, as portrayed in the movie “Erin Brockovich.” Now, activists say Hinkley faces a new environmental threat – this one carried on the wind.
Christina Alvarez, who turned 17 on Monday, has a 15-month-old son. She barely speaks to the father any more. And while she hopes to earn her high school diploma and move her baby away from the crime, poverty and emotional defeat of her own childhood neighborhood, she knows the odds are against her. Activists say that for many teenage parents in Kern County, Alvarez’s experience is typical. Increasingly, it’s out of sync with the rest of California.