Latest From California Healthline:
California Healthline Original Stories
A Wake-Up Call On Data-Collecting Smart Beds And Sleep Apps
An array of products — from mattresses and sensors to sleep trackers and apps — are catching consumers’ attention. But privacy experts are concerned about what becomes of all the personal information these products collect. (Julie Appleby, )
Good morning! UC Davis Health has agreed to negotiate with the Committee of Interns and Residents on pay and working conditions for the academic health system’s roughly 800 residents and fellows in a win for the union. More on that below, but first here are some of your top California health stories for the day.
Small-Business Owners See Hope In Governor’s Plan To Expand Health Law Subsidies: Many small-business owners and entrepreneurs in California make a little too much to quality for Medi-Cal but not enough to make plans on the Covered California marketplace affordable. Currently, Covered California enrollees making less than roughly $49,000 per year get federal subsidies to lower their insurance costs. But under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan that would extend to people making up to about $73,000 a year. Newsom is hoping assistance for the middle class will draw more healthy people into the market, and he wants to fund the subsidies with fines from an individual mandate for the state. Mark Herbert, California director for the Small Business Majority, a policy group promoting small-business growth, says that could be a game-changer. “It’s really ensuring that products are affordable for individuals. That makes them much more likely to purchase that insurance,” he said. “We’re going to see greater take-up.” Read more from Sammy Caiola and Yesenia Amaro of Capital Public Radio.
Big Film Companies Follow Netflix’s Lead In Voicing Opposition To Georgia’s Abortion Bill: Georgia has become somewhat of a “Hollywood of the South,” because of its favorable tax incentives. When the state first passed its restrictive heartbeat bill, the film industry didn’t react as strongly as some advocates had hoped. But then things changed. After Netflix Chief Content Officer Ted Sarandos recently said that the Los Gatos, Calif., company would rethink its “entire investment” in Georgia if the law went into effect in January as projected, a handful of major media companies followed suit. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there, and we will have to heed their wishes in that regard,” Disney Chief Executive Bob Iger said. “Right now we are watching it very carefully.” Entertainment production in Georgia supports some 92,000 jobs, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America. Read more from Ryan Faughnder of the Los Angeles Times and Sasha Ingber of NPR.
A Look At California’s Deadliest Wildfires Shows That Human Elements Are Often To Blame: Experts say that although a fire’s cause typically doesn’t affect how it grows or moves, it’s still important to figure out where and why it started to prevent it from happening in the future. By the end of a probe, Cal Fire assigns blame to one of a dozen causes: arson, debris burning, electrical, equipment, campfire, lightning, playing with fire, railroad, smoking, vehicle, miscellaneous or undetermined. As fire season ramps up, state officials are warning that heavier-than-usual rain and snow in recent months have knocked down trees and led to an overgrowth of grass and shrubs that will soon dry out and become ready-made fuel for 2019 wildfires. The San Francisco Chronicle looks at the causes behind 10 of the largest, deadliest and most destructive wildfires in state history. A couple of the worst ones — the Mendocino Complex and the Woolsey Fire in Southern California — remain under investigation. Read more from Kimberly Veklerov.
Meanwhile, Regulators approved Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s first annual, state-mandated wildfire prevention plan Thursday as they also signed off on new standards for one of the utility’s primary strategies: turning off power lines during dangerously dry and windy weather. Read more from J.D. Morris of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Below, check out the full round-up of California Healthline original stories, state coverage and the best of the rest of the national news for the day.
More News From Across The State
Sacramento Bee:
UCD Health To Bargain With Union Representing 800 Residents
UC Davis Health has agreed to negotiate with the Committee of Interns and Residents on pay and working conditions for the academic health system’s roughly 800 residents and fellows, union officials and UCD Health told The Bee on Thursday. ...The union, a unit of Service Employees International Union, announced in March that it had enough signatures to qualify to collectively bargain on behalf of physician trainees at UCD Health, and in mid-May, the California Public Employment Relations Board certified that CIR had collected enough signatures to represent the fellows and residents. (Anderson, 5/30)
KQED:
Wage Theft At California Elder Care Facilities
Elder care is a growing industry as the population ages and a lot of people are opting for alternatives to traditional nursing homes. One of the options available is a board and care facility. But several issues have arisen with it, including violations of labor laws. (Nelson, 5/30)
The Associated Press:
Union: LA Officer Gets Typhoid Fever, 5 Others Show Symptoms
A Los Angeles police detective has been diagnosed with typhoid fever, a rare illness typically spread through contaminated food or water, and at least five other officers who work in the same station are showing symptoms, union officials said Thursday. The six officers work in the Central Division station, where a state investigation into unsafe and unsanitary working conditions led to penalties and more than $5,000 in fines earlier this month, documents show. (5/30)
ABC 23 Bakersfield:
Adventist Health Offering Free Childhood Immunizations Next Month
Next month, parents will have an opportunity to get their kids vaccinated for free thanks to Adventist Health -Bakersfield. According to the Vaccine for Children guidelines, the vaccines are complimentary to children under the age of 18 who either have no health insurance, enrolled in Medi-Cal (must present Medi-Cal card at each visit), or American Indian or Native Alaskan. Organizers say that no appointment is necessary, but immunization cards are required. (5/30)
Sacramento Bee:
Charity Claiming To Feed Kids Sued By State AG
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra this week sued the charity Aid for Starving Children for deceptive solicitations that earned its administrators $6.2 million between 2011 and 2018. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday, contends the Sonoma County-based charity used only a small fraction of its overall revenues for its stated goal of combating starvation internationally.According to the lawsuit, about 93 percent of the money it claimed to raise from 2011 to 2018 came in the form in “gifts-in-kind,” mostly drugs donated by pharmaceutical companies that were incorrectly valued at U.S. list prices rather than the prices in the countries where the drugs were actually used. (Chalermkraivuth, 5/30)
The Associated Press:
Northern California Man Sentenced For Selling Fertilizer As Diet Pill
A man who sold a toxic fertilizer as a diet pill has been sentenced to three years in federal prison.Scott Edward Cavell of Sacramento was sentenced Tuesday for interstate commerce of misbranded drugs. Prosecutors say that between 2015 and 2017, Cavell and others marketed a drug called DNP for weight-loss and fat-burning while officially selling it as a fertilizer. (5/29)
The New York Times:
Measles Outbreak: Cases Reach Highest Level In More Than 25 Years
There have been more measles cases in the United States the first five months of 2019 than there were in all of 1992, when the last large outbreak occurred, federal health officials said on Thursday, in part because of the spread of misinformation about vaccines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday that there had been 971 known cases of measles in the United States so far this year. That is eight more cases than in 1992, the previous high since vaccines became widely used, when 963 cases were reported in the United States all year. And it is a sharp jump from last year, when just 372 cases were reported, the center said. (Earlier Thursday, the C.D.C. mistakenly said that the previous high was in 1994.) (Stack, 5/30)
The Wall Street Journal:
U.S. Measles Outbreaks Hit Highest Level In More Than 25 Years
One reason for worry about the current outbreaks, Dr. Clark said, is that people are still being exposed to measles in public venues, including doctors’ waiting rooms. Those are places in which exposures are common early in outbreaks, but not this many months in, when public-health officials usually have been able to tamp down widespread transmission, Dr. Clark said. “Those things should be brought under control, and they’re worrying signs if you continue to see them,” he said. “It makes us worried that somebody has been exposed to measles you weren’t aware of.” (McKay, 5/30)
The Washington Post:
U.S. Measles Cases In First Five Months Of 2019 Surpass Total For Any Year Since 1992
A country is considered to have eliminated measles when there has been an absence of continuous spread of the disease for more than a year. The United States achieved that status in 2000 through a massive sustained effort to vaccinate children. If this year ends that accomplishment, it would be an enormous public-health loss, experts said. “It means that a really very harmful infection had been eliminated, but we have now let it back into our country, and it is a threat to our babies and young children as they grow up,” said William Schaffner, an infectious-disease professor at Vanderbilt University who has taken care of measles patients. (Sun, 5/30)
The Wall Street Journal:
Facebook Pledged Crackdown On Vaccine Misinformation. Then Not Much Happened.
Ten weeks after Facebook Inc. FB 0.45% pledged to fight vaccine misinformation, such content remains widely available across its platforms as the social-media giant grapples with how aggressively to limit the spread of hoaxes and deceptions. Facebook as of this week is still running paid ads for a prominent antivaccination group that suggests unethical doctors have conspired to hide evidence of harm vaccines do to children. (Horwitz, 5/30)
The Washington Post:
Hundreds Of Minors Held At U.S. Border Facilities Are There Beyond Legal Time Limits
Many of the nearly 2,000 unaccompanied migrant children being held in overcrowded U.S. Border Patrol facilities have been there beyond legally allowed time limits, including some who are 12 or younger, according to new government data obtained by The Washington Post. Federal law and court orders require that children in Border Patrol custody be transferred to more-hospitable shelters no longer than 72 hours after they are apprehended. But some unaccompanied children are spending longer than a week in Border Patrol stations and processing centers, according to two Customs and Border Protection officials and two other government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the unreleased data. (Hauslohner and Sacchetti, 5/30)
The Hill:
Civil Rights Groups Sue Over Trump Foster Care Policies
Civil rights groups are filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration and the state of South Carolina, alleging the governments are making it easier for taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies to discriminate against same-sex and non-evangelical couples. Thursday’s lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Lambda Legal was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina on behalf of a married lesbian couple. Eden Rogers and Brandy Welch were turned away by Miracle Hill Ministries, South Carolina’s largest state-contracted, federally-funded foster care agency. (Weixel, 5/30)
Bloomberg:
Too Many Medicines Simply Don’t Work
It’s possible that the medicine you’re taking isn’t helping—even if it’s been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. That’s the upshot of a pair of studies in the latest issue of JAMA Internal Medicine. Not good. As an invited commentary in the same issue says, “Charging vulnerable patients for drugs without evidence that they actually improve patients’ survival and quality of life is unconscionable.” One study examines 93 cancer drug uses that were granted accelerated approval by the FDA between 1992 and 2017. Of those, only 19 showed improvement in overall survival. Another 39 showed improvement by a surrogate measure, such as tumor shrinkage. (Coy, 5/30)
The New York Times:
Fighting The Gender Stereotypes That Warp Biomedical Research
Say you are prescribed medication for depression, anxiety or even just to sleep. Would you want to take it if you knew that the drug had only been tested on men and male animals? Rebecca Shansky, a neuroscientist at Northeastern University in Boston, thinks you might not. When she tells nonscientific audiences that researchers “for the most part don’t study female animals, people are blown away,” she said. She added: “It seems like such an obvious thing to a normal person. But when you come up in the academic and science world, it’s like, ‘Oh no, females are so complicated, so we just don’t study them.’” (Klein, 5/30)
Los Angeles Times:
Needing Emergency Treatment Is Bad Enough. End Surprise ER Bills
When you go to a grocery store, you don’t put a loaf of bread or a cut of meat into your basket without looking at the price tag. But when Americans go to a doctor or a hospital, they typically have no idea what their healthcare provider will charge for the services they’re going to receive. Instead, they stick with the providers in their network, trust their doctors’ treatment recommendations and hope that their insurer will cover most of the cost. That’s fine until you’re in a car wreck and an ambulance takes you to an out-of-network hospital for emergency care. Or until you go to an in-network emergency room, only to discover later that the specialists assigned to your case were out-of-network. (5/28)
Los Angeles Times:
California Hospitals Are Fighting A Proposal To End Surprise ER Bills
The Legislature has already protected Californians against surprise bills from doctors for nonemergency care, and Chiu’s proposal was intended to close the loophole for hospital ERs. But AB 1611 didn’t propose the same formula for resolving disputes between insurers and out-of-network providers over fees, and that’s drawing some special-interest flak. The insurers lobby wants to keep moving the measure forward while stakeholders work out their problems with the language; the hospitals lobby wants it to die in the Assembly unless the language changes now. (Jon Healey, 5/30)
Sacramento Bee:
How President Trump Is Delivering Results On Drug Prices
Americans have heard politicians talk about high drug prices for years. It’s one of the main problems in health care that both President Donald Trump and I, as his health secretary, have talked about a great deal too. But the Trump administration isn’t offering up just talk — we’re delivering results. In December for the first time in 46 years, the official government measure of inflation in drug prices actually dropped for all of 2018. More than a dozen companies last year cut their prices, froze prices or rolled back price increases. (HHS Secretary Alex Azar, 5/30)
The Wall Street Journal:
California’s Medicaid For All
Milton Friedman once said you can’t have open borders and a welfare state. He may have found an ally in California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is in a standoff with the Democratic Legislature over expanding Medicaid to undocumented immigrants. Mr. Newsom earlier this year proposed expanding Medicaid to unauthorized immigrants under age 26. Undocumented children under age 19 and pregnant women are already eligible in California, and the Governor calculated it would cost the state a mere $100 million to extend eligibility to age 25—an ostensibly modest down payment on his promise of “universal coverage.” (5/27)
Sacramento Bee:
Americans Are Unhealthy Because They Work Too Much
A recent study found – surprise, surprise – that even though Americans know it’s not good for them to sit so much, they’re sitting more than ever. (Just as I’m doing while I write these sentences.) The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that total daily sitting time among teenagers and adults had increased between 2007 and 2016. For adolescents, sedentary time grew from seven hours a day to a little more than eight hours. Adults actually sit less, but their sedentary time grew from 5.5 hours a day to nearly 6.5. Work and school did not account for the increase. (Karin Klein, 5/25)
Los Angeles Times:
UCSF Drops Affiliation With Catholic Hospitals, A Victory For Reproductive Rights
UC San Francisco announced Tuesday that it is dropping plans for an expanded affiliation with Dignity Health, a Catholic hospital chain that places flagrantly discriminatory restrictions on abortions, transgender care and other services. The decision was announced in a letter to the UCSF community and “concerned citizens” signed by Sam Hawgood, the USCF chancellor, and Mark Laret, CEO of UCSF Health, who had been pushing hard for the plan in presentations to the UC regents. (Michael Hiltzik, 5/28)
Los Angeles Times:
L.A. County's Juvenile Facilities Need Leaders Willing To Fix A Broken System
The department has failed to prioritize and facilitate the kind of positive relationship-building essential to a therapeutic, rehabilitative operation. There is a serious need for more training in youth development and trauma-informed care, for enrichment programming, for staff with mental health expertise and for a better grievance system. (Jacqueline Jacobs Caster, 5/28)
San Jose Mercury News:
Let California Cannabis Companies Deliver To Customers
Cannabis prohibition and failed drug war policies have caused systemic harm to our communities. An important way to repair that harm is to build a robust, regulated marijuana market that provides real, substantive opportunities. In 2016, the voters in California overwhelmingly agreed by approving Proposition 64, which legalized regulated cannabis access to all Californians over 21. (Annarae Grabstein, 5/29)
Los Angeles Times:
A Court Decision Letting Homeless People Keep All Their Belongings Helps No One
Because the city of Los Angeles does not have enough shelter beds for its outsize homeless population, homeless people have been allowed for more than a decade to sleep on the sidewalks at night. Thanks to new court settlement, they now have the right to keep a nearly unlimited amount of possessions with them on the sidewalks of skid row. This is not what progress looks like in the homelessness crisis. (5/31)