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The research, focused on Los Angeles County, casts a positive light on a 2004 initiative that expanded mental health services statewide. A recent state audit, however, suggested hundreds of millions of dollars from the initiative were piling up, left unspent by counties.
An addiction-treatment physician fatally shot a troubled ex-Marine after the man pummeled him inside his California office, police records show. The tragedy illustrates how the limited number of clinics available to prescribe buprenorphine, a drug that all but erases opioid withdrawal, can become crowded, chaotic and dangerous.
A new study shows that educational sessions about high blood pressure at African American barbershops, coupled with prescribing and helping to manage medication, reduced hypertension rates significantly.
Begun as a health care safety net for children and low-income families, Medicaid increasingly underwrites a range of services in America’s public schools.
A Bay Area public health campaign harnesses the power of poetry to confront the root causes of a diabetes epidemic that is disproportionately hitting minority youth and those from low-income homes.
California lawmakers are considering a bill that would require student health centers at all of the state’s four-year public universities to carry the abortion pill. Students at campuses across the state sounded off on the proposal.
The effort, overseen by the county’s health services department, aims to improve care for a population with high rates of chronic disease, mental illness and drug addiction.
A new study shows that, in California, moving the minimum age from 18 to 21 significantly reduced purchase by those under 18. That could be because teenagers had less access to tobacco through slightly older friends.
Saving the lives of people with the bleeding disorder can require high doses of expensive blood-clotting factor. Taxpayers foot much of the bill as manufacturers profit enormously.
State says its new site is easier to navigate, though it remains a work in progress. Advocates for nursing home patients call it “a huge step in the wrong direction” that could endanger people’s lives.
California officials should have obtained federal approval before they cut reimbursement rates for dental hygienists who serve frail Californians living in nursing homes and board-and-care facilities, a judge has ruled.
California’s health insurers trotted out a heart-healthy character with an ulterior motive — taking a dig at drugmakers.
When President Donald Trump signed the nation’s new tax law, he also killed the Affordable Care Act’s tax penalty — but not until 2019. Despite widespread confusion, experts caution that consumers still need to pay the tax penalty if they were uninsured last year or will be this year.
Vaccinations rates have climbed significantly among hospital workers in recent years, to 83 percent. But that rate masks wide variation among facilities and types of workers. Nationally, the rules are far from uniform or ironclad.
How a California health plan’s CEO and her husband, an executive consultant, got rich off the taxpayer-funded program for the poor. Critics see a conflict of interest, the plan doesn’t, and the state has no rules either way.
A multistate nursing agreement allows nurses to work in numerous states without the hassle and expense of obtaining licenses in each one. More than half of states have signed onto an upgraded version of the agreement — but not California.
The investigations follow testimony in a lawsuit by a former Aetna medical director who said he relied on information from nurses, without reviewing patient records himself, when deciding which treatments to allow and deny.
Fentanyl, a significant cause of overdoses and deaths across the country, has begun showing up in California street drugs. State health officials have responded with a bold but controversial policy: paying for test strips so users can check their stash.
California’s family leave program allows people to get time off to care for a new child or sick relative. The wage replacement rate rises this year.
Health care professionals increasingly collaborate with anti-abuse advocates to identify victims and ensure they get the help they need. One women’s center is opening a shelter on the campus of a large public hospital in Los Angeles.
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