Dr. David Williams, an internationally recognized authority on social influences on health, currently teaches at the Harvard School of Public Health. His research has enhanced our understanding of the complex ways in which socioeconomic status, race, stress, and religious involvement can affect physical and mental health. The Everyday Discrimination scale that he developed is currently one of the most widely used measures to assess perceived discrimination in health studies.
We’ve long known that diabetes and its related illnesses cause havoc in people’s lives and drive up health care costs, but a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has quantified the damage done with a sobering new statistic: nearly one-third of hospital stays by Californians age 35 and older involve a person who has been diagnosed with diabetes.
More than 3 million Californians have enrolled in private or public health coverage under the Affordable Care Act, exceeding projections made before enrollment began last fall, officials said Thursday.
California’s new health insurance exchange appears to be gaining momentum with consumers. Officials announced Thursday that 109,000 people had completed the application process and picked a private insurance plan through CoveredCa.com in October and November. About twice as many people completed the process in November as had in October, and the numbers for the first week of December were even higher.
California’s new online insurance marketplace signed up 31,000 customers in the first month it was open for business and another 18,000 in the first two weeks of November, officials said Wednesday.
The federal health reform known as the Affordable Care Act has so many moving parts that it is almost impossible to predict with confidence how it all will work once the law inches closer to full implementation on Jan. 1. But one very big piece of the Act is almost certain to roll out as intended: the expansion of the Medi-Cal program to accommodate more than a million low-income Californians who until recently had almost no access to the doctors, hospitals and labs that many people take for granted.
The eyes of the entire nation will soon be on President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which takes full effect Jan. 1 with the requirement that nearly all Americans obtain health insurance or else pay a penalty on their taxes. But many people probably don’t know that much of the new law has actually been in place for nearly three years now, and millions of Californians are already benefiting from its provisions.
Nearly one in every four California kids lives in poverty – a familiar but still-stunning statistic in a land as plentiful as ours. You would think this would be the top focus of the state’s policymakers – on the left and the right. Either by increasing public assistance, or increasing economic opportunity, or both, California must do something to lift the next generation out of this condition or risk supporting a permanent underclass for decades to come. That’s why a recent report card on the wellbeing of children from kidscount.org, a project of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, is worth reviewing.
What will the Obama Administration’s decision to suspend enforcement of penalties against employer who don’t insure their workers mean for California’s implementation of the Affordable Care Act?
Jerry Brown was the kid the first time he was governor, nearly 40 years ago. Now he is definitely providing adult supervision in Sacramento. Since retaking the executive suite, Brown has lectured Californians – and the Legislature – about the need to get real on the state budget. His stance is pretty simple: the state should not spend more than it takes in.