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.
Twenty-one-year-old Albert is a self-described transient who picks up odd jobs whenever possible. On this day in mid-July, he’s waiting to be picked up for day labor in Santa Ana. Albert has a black spot on his foot that he knows could signal diabetes, an illness that runs in his family and forced his uncle to lose a leg.
In the first full year under the federal Affordable Care Act, California led the nation – embracing the new law eagerly, implementing it quickly, and providing relatively robust choice with low premiums through a web site that, most of the time, actually worked.
Oyuny Bahena was pregnant and living in a homeless shelter in Merced County when she first met with a home-visit nurse.
Home blood pressure monitoring devices can save money by improving healthcare quality and reducing healthcare costs, according to a new study funded by the American Heart Association.
The California agency that oversees the state’s low-income health plan vastly overstated the number of doctors who accepted patients through the program last year, even as the number of people enrolled was set to skyrocket under the federal Affordable Care Act, the California Health Report has found.
A few years ago, Kathleen Hamilton became a foster mom to 13 and 14 year old boys, who also happened to be her nephews. Both needed extensive dental work, and the services were to be covered by the state’s Medi-Cal program. But year after year, Hamilton ran into a snag.
Nearly 25 percent fewer physicians were signed up to treat low-income patients in the state’s insurance program this spring compared to a year prior, despite the surge in patients enrolled in Medi-Cal.
On her way to her office in Oxnard, Rachel Casas drives past farmworkers bent over in the fields. Because she is a neuropsychologist, she wonders whether there are pesticides in those fields and if the chemicals may be affecting the laborers.
Consumers have been complaining this year that Covered California insurance plans have doctor’s networks that are too narrow. The doctors they want to see don’t accept the insurance, they say.