A proposed ballot measure facing voters this fall would give the state the authority to deny health insurance rate increases, a change some consumer groups say is long overdue but that opponents warn could impede Californians’ access to insurance coverage.
Dr. Rishi Manchanda believes the key to better health for homeless veterans is improving their lives. He’s developed a clinic at the VA hospital in Los Angeles where vets can find housing, mental health care and help with benefits and legal issues.
The inmate had stripped off his suicide-prevention gown. Such garments are of heavy fabric, like moving blankets, so that inmates in the Los Angeles County Jail’s “high observation” wing can’t tear them up to make ropes and hang themselves. This man had rolled his gown into a club. Standing naked, he bashed it again and again against the walls of his cell.
Ben Rockwell is a 68-year-old retired nurse with Parkinson’s disease and a long list of other health problems. He has to juggle two government health plans to make sure he gets the care he needs, but over the past two decades, he’s gotten good at it.
Adrian Tapia and his wife Ana faced more than fear after Adrian was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2013. Between the doctor visits, the scans, surgery and rehabilitation, paperwork had to be filled out. Treatments required a two-hour-plus drive each way back and forth from the Imperial Valley to San Diego.
As a college-prep consultant, Marina Grijalva heard about the Affordable Care Act and how it would enable her to sign up for health insurance. But the enrollment campaigns — which the state poured tens of millions of dollars into — didn’t reach her sister or many other Latinos.
A state legislative committee ordered an audit Thursday of provider directories that are given to people in California’s low-income health program, after reports of major inaccuracies.
As people with mental health crises overwhelm California’s hospitals, jails and homeless shelters, counties across the state are gradually embracing residential respite houses located in neighborhoods and staffed by peers — people who have been consumers of the mental health system.
A cutting-edge program run through the UC San Francisco School of Nursing is helping people with mental illness better manage all of their health needs.
Shortly after she began participating in California’s Welfare-to-Work program, Michele Marino began to think she was going crazy. The single mother had just enrolled in a government cash-assistance program to help support herself and her two young sons, while she searched for a job and took classes at a community college. But daily tasks, school, parenting and the government requirements to stay in the welfare program felt overwhelming.