The Los Angeles Sports Arena was transformed last Thursday through Sunday into a giant field hospital for some of the city’s estimated 2 million uninsured and many more who are underinsured. More than 4,000 people registered for the event, sponsored by the non-profit CareNow USA. Some didn’t know how sick they were.
Author: Robin Urevich
A cafe in this Los Angeles neighborhood turns into a hub for artistic expression and health education.
A Stanislaus County medical education program that recruits and trains doctors to work with the underserved is funded by the federal health reform act. It is expected to help reduce the shortage of family physicians in the Central Valley.
Environmentalists and others have been saying for nearly a year that the state caved to industry pressure when it approved the use of the pesticide methyl iodide at levels more than 100 times higher than its own scientists recommended. Now a newly uncovered memo written by an official of the company that makes the pesticide shows that the firm gave managers in the Department of Pesticide Regulation calculations they could use to overturn the conclusions of state scientists and an advisory panel convened to review their work.
Shelter has always been a problem for people leaving prisons – felons typically aren’t welcome in public housing. That might change soon in Los Angeles County, which is bracing for an influx of low-level offenders they are newly responsible for managing, as are counties throughout the state. So how are other jurisdictions responding to their housing crisis?
Environmentalists fighting to roll back the approval of a controversial pesticide released documents Thursday that they said show regulators put politics before science when they approved methyl iodide for use in California agriculture last December.
Eleven thousand Monterey County residents are expected to be eligible for healthcare benefits under the Bridge to Reform program, according to an estimate by the UCLA Center for Public Health Research. But the county can only afford to insure 1,000 to 1,500 of them this year, even though the federal government will match its spending dollar for dollar.
In Salinas, a group of activists say the local hospital board, elected by the voters to run the public healthcare system, doesn’t represent the people it serves.
At a Planned Parenthood clinic near Salinas, women farm workers who plan to have kids in the near future are learning to protect themselves against pesticide exposure on the job. Billions of pounds of pesticides are sprayed or injected in the ground each year in California, but researchers say they’re just beginning to learn how those chemicals affect pregnant women and their children.
National Union of Healthcare Workers has struggled to make that case to the state’s healthcare workers ever since it broke from the Service Employees International Union, the nation’s largest labor union, two years ago in a dispute over local control and governance. But now, in Salinas, the union has another chance to prove itself, if it can win a solid contract and block lay-offs.