Must-Reads Of The Week From Brianna Labuskes
Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health articles from the week so you don’t have to.
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Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health articles from the week so you don’t have to.
Unwilling to wait for federal action, California Gov. Gavin Newsom says he has a plan that could extract discounts from drugmakers and save the state money — one he hopes other states can join.
Newsletter editor Brianna Labuskes wades through hundreds of health articles from the week so you don’t have to.
Just hours into his tenure as California’s new governor, Democrat Gavin Newsom proposed major plans to insure more Californians, including state-funded financial aid for health insurance and a requirement for Californians to have coverage.
Managed-care plans, which reap billions in taxpayer dollars to coordinate care for low-income Americans on Medicaid, outsource crucial treatment decisions to subcontractors that aren’t directly accountable to the government. In California, health officials say one firm improperly withheld or delayed care for hundreds of people.
The potentially improper payments occurred in 2014 and 2015, when the state says it was under pressure from a massive influx of new applicants due to the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion.
The money was paid on behalf of more than 400,000 people who may have been ineligible for the public program, a state audit found. One had been dead for four years before payments stopped.
California’s 13 children’s hospitals are asking voters in November to approve $1.5 billion in bonds to help them pay for construction and equipment, the third such measure in 14 years. Some health care experts and election analysts believe the repeated financial requests aren’t justified.
John Cox, California’s Republican candidate for governor, contends that policies on abortion, health insurance and health care access should be guided by the conservative ideals of free market competition and personal responsibility. He hasn’t offered specific policy positions on health care, except that government should largely stay out of it.
A clinic in El Cajon, Calif., treats patients recovering from anything from gunshot wounds to PTSD and anxiety about family left behind.
Amid the buzz over apps and electronic medical records rescuing modern medicine, California’s Medicaid program still clings to 1970s-era technology. A reboot may cost half a billion dollars.
California frequently innovates to address its wide-ranging health care needs, but it has not always achieved its aims. A series of articles in the journal Health Affairs shows, among other things, that efforts to care for HIV patients, provide better access to reproductive services for low-income women and fill gaps in primary care have sometimes fallen flat.
California legislators approved some significant health care proposals in their rush to meet the Friday end-of-session deadline. They tackled controversial topics, such as making abortion pills available on college campuses, and adopted measures countering Trump administration attacks on the Affordable Care Act.
The number of diabetes drug prescriptions filled for low-income people enrolled in Medicaid rose sharply in states that expanded eligibility for the program under the Affordable Care Act, according to a new study.
Kaiser Health News gives readers a chance to comment on a recent batch of stories.
Some California children with serious health care problems wait more than a year for wheelchairs, bath benches, commodes, specialized crutches and other crucial medical equipment. Critics blame the delays on a confusing bureaucratic maze of private insurers and public programs.
After rallies and protests in the San Joaquin Valley congressional districts, the urgency over protecting coverage under the ACA seems to have waned — at least in the primaries. Three of four seats in the region are likely to remain red, political forecasters say.
KHN’s newsletter editor, Brianna Labuskes, wades through hundreds of health articles from the week so you don’t have to.
The Golden State ranks near the bottom in its enrollment of eligible people in the food assistance program known as SNAP. Now state officials want to tap its robust Medicaid rolls to boost SNAP signups.
In the face of federal efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, policymakers in the largest state are proposing laws and other changes to counter them. Beyond that, they’re aggressively pushing measures to expand health coverage beyond what the ACA envisioned.
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