Kaiser Permanente Program To Help Underserved Communities Helps Health Care Business Owner Realize Dreams
The program, called Inner City Capital Connections, is described as “a mini-MBA on steroids” for small business owners, with the goal of creating jobs and thus health care coverage for people in low-income neighborhoods.
Sacramento Bee:
How This Sacramento Business Let Clients Go And Yet Hired More Health Care Workers
Kaiser was paying the full cost of the program, known as Inner City Capital Connections, for any business owner who qualified, but only 50 people would get a seat. Businesses must be based in an economically distressed or underserved community or, alternatively, 40 percent of their employees must live in such neighborhoods. Kaiser said its goal in sponsoring the program is to improve health and wellness of residents in these neighborhoods by ensuring residents have good jobs that provide health care benefits for workers and their families. (Anderson, 9/20)
In other news from across the state —
Fresno Bee:
Sex Offenders Want To Be Deported
The undocumented men at Coalinga State Hospital are in a unique predicament that seems to be nobody’s jurisdiction. They aren’t prisoners, they are “civil detainees.” They entered the country illegally, committed crimes and served their prison sentences. But a state-mandated mental evaluation of sex offenders – a policy that went into effect in 1996 – put them in Coalinga instead of back into society. (Mays, 9/19)
KQED:
California’s Plan To Store Water Underground Could Risk Contamination
To contend with the likelihood of future extreme droughts, some of these new strategies rely on underground aquifers — an approach far removed from traditional dam-based water storage. While diversifying the toolbelt of water management strategies will likely help insulate the state against loss, a group of researchers at Stanford University are drawing attention to a risk they say has long ridden under the radar of public consciousness: the introduction of dangerous chemicals into California groundwater, both through industrial and natural pathways. (Heidt, 9/19)