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Heidi de Marco was a reporter and producer for KFF Health News until March 2023.
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Poverty is real in the Coachella Valley, a region known for its glitzy resorts and music festival. During the COVID crisis, the California National Guard and California Conservation Corps are helping an area food bank distribute food to older residents and those with disabilities.
In Los Angeles County and beyond, people continue to toil through the coronavirus pandemic, often in positions that put them in constant contact with the public. Many are low-wage workers who can’t afford to stop working.
Californians are under orders to stay home to slow the spread of the coronavirus — and the result is that some of Southern California’s best-known spots are shuttered or deserted, from Santa Monica Pier to Olvera Street.
In California’s rural Central Valley, low-income children have limited access to vision care. School districts are teaming up with nonprofits to fill the gaps.
For Alzheimer’s patients and their caregivers, social and emotional isolation is a threat. But hundreds of “Memory Cafes” around the country offer them a chance to be with others who understand, and to receive social and cognitive stimulation in the process.
Neil Mahoney had terminal cancer. He also had a legal right to aid-in-dying. But his faith-based hospital called it “morally unacceptable.” So he turned to a network of Colorado doctors to fulfill his last wish.
Across the U.S., people with early dementia are signing new advance directives to confirm their end-of-life wishes while they still have the ability to do so. But doctors say the documents may offer a false sense of security.
Health care workers face a greater threat of workplace violence than workers in most other industries. Hospitals are installing security cameras and panic buttons, arming security guards with stun guns and teaching their employees how to handle potentially violent situations.
Millions of injuries and malfunctions once funneled into a hidden Food and Drug Administration database are now available.
A 3-year-old girl put matching doll shoes up her nose. One came out easily. The second required an emergency department visit ― and generated a bill that is not child’s play.
It’s easy to buy all the supplies online, and thousands of e-liquid recipes on the internet walk people through all the steps. But experts warn about safety.
A seedy section of downtown Los Angeles has become the go-to place for those who trade in wholesale — and sometimes counterfeit — vaping products. As more people fall ill with a mysterious lung disease linked to e-cigarette use, the manufacture and distribution of vaping products face increased scrutiny.
Throughout her young life, Sylvia Colt-Lacayo has been told her disability didn’t need to hold her back. She graduated near the top of her high school class. She was co-captain of the mock trial team. In April, she learned she had been admitted to Stanford University with a full scholarship. Now, the struggle to fund the caregivers she needs to leave home is proving her toughest battle yet.
In Colorado case, the right to aid a cancer patient’s death runs up against faith-based hospital policies. As more states have passed laws, about 1 in 6 acute care beds nationally is in a hospital that is Catholic-owned or -affiliated.
Jorge A. Perez and his management company, EmpowerHMS, helped run an empire of rural hospitals. Now, in a staggering implosion, 12 of them have entered bankruptcy and eight have closed their doors, leaving hundreds of residents without jobs and their communities without lifesaving emergency medical care. So, what happened?
People with diabetes say they’ve been waiting for years for better technology to manage their chronic condition. Tired of waiting, some tech-savvy, do-it-yourselfers are constructing their own devices using open-source programming instructions.
A growing number of pregnant women are among the migrants seeking asylum in the United States. Many must wait in Mexico until their cases are heard, spending weeks or months in migrant shelters with limited access to health care.
A large public hospital in Los Angeles gets over 1,000 unidentified patients a year. Most are quickly identified, but some require considerable gumshoe work — a task that can be complicated by medical privacy laws.
In California, people who are black or Latino are more than twice as likely as whites to undergo amputations related to diabetes, a Kaiser Health News analysis found. The pattern is not unique to California.
Asylum seekers from Mexico and Central America, housed in migrant shelters in the border city of Tijuana, Mexico, are often sick and exhausted from their long journeys. Volunteer health workers from Southern California recently sent a mobile clinic to one of those shelters and spent a day tending to its inhabitants.
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