The pandemic and protests have laid bare the depths of our nation’s disparities. Your race should not determine whether you live or die. It should not influence whether your doctor listens to you, or whether you can breathe clean air.
But—too often—it does.
In my own family, I’ve seen the results of racism and redlining play out over generations in Los Angeles, limiting where some family members could purchase homes, raise their children and retire.
Despite repeated Republican-led Congressional efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act and President Donald Trump declaring on Tuesday that Obamacare is “virtually dead,” California’s health insurance exchange is still very much open for business.
A new bill from Baldwin Park Assemblywoman Blanca Rubio aims to make it easier for domestic violence victims to receive CalWORKs and ensure that caseworkers offer resources to survivors.
When Jackie called her assigned primary-care physician for the first time, she was told that her doctor was a specialist, not a primary care physician. She would need to see someone else, they informed her. Jackie then called her insurance company, and asked for help finding another doctor. Armed with a list from the insurance company, Jackie tried again, calling a doctor in the insurer’s directory. But, she recounted, “the receptionist said, ‘He’s not taking anybody and we’ve been trying to get off the list for three years.’”
Every morning, Tracey Watts checked her body for blood. The recent PhD has a rare condition that causes her to have leaky blood vessels. She bled out of pinprick-size spots on her lower body and legs for eight months as she searched for a specialist who accepted her insurance. Watts is one of millions of Californians enrolled in health plans exempted from a law that requires insurers to provide patients with timely access to doctors.
The California department that runs the state’s low-income health program released updated rules last week that spell out how far patients may need to travel to see a doctor. Medi-Cal managed-care health plans, which cover more than a quarter of Californians, will be required to have primary-care doctors within 10 miles or 30 minutes from patients’ homes.
Should patients in rural California have to drive four times as far to see a neurologist as someone who lives in Los Angeles? Should your access to health care depend on your zip code?
If the Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act becomes law, more than 5 million California children would be at risk of losing health coverage and some of the state’s hospitals may not be able to keep their doors open, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said Tuesday.
A four-category system for intimate partner violence that Susan Holt created with her colleagues at the Los Angeles LGBT Center has become a standard of practice at the non-profit, the largest provider of LGBT medical and mental health services nationwide. But Holt and her colleagues are still working to spread the word about the four categories, which, Holt believes, can be helpful for treating the wider community as well.
If Washington, D.C. legislators approve cuts to government health care, California’s rural counties are among those who will suffer most, according to a new report.