Latest California Healthline Stories
Health Care Changes Happening — and Coming
Jerry Brown is expected to release his budget proposal today, and it won’t be pretty.
Some of those cuts are likely to hit health care programs in California. To be ready, Diana Dooley, the new secretary of Health and Human Services, recently appointed several familiar names to her team:
Health Insurance Regulation Proposal Is Back
This week’s large rate hike announcement by Blue Shield makes the perfect backdrop for debating an Assembly bill to regulate those kinds of rate increases, according to Assembly member Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), who introduced AB 52 last month.
“It sure adds fuel to the significance of AB 52,” Feuer said. “I am optimistic that the day is coming when insurers will need to justify increases like this.”
Feuer’s bill was eligible to go to committee yesterday.
Researcher Paints Scary Picture of State’s Future
The Medi-Cal system in California is flawed in a basic way, according to researcher Stephen Moses of Pacific Research Institute, a California-based think tank.
“Instead of Medi-Cal being a safety net for the poor,” he said, “it provides very generous benefits to many in the middle class, far more than just the poor.”
The state provides long-term care to people who might have had the means to pay for some form of that care in their lifetimes, Moses contends.
State Gathering Info on Hospital-Acquired Infections
The state Department of Public Health recently released its first report on “healthcare-associated infections” (HAI) — those infections patients actually get while they’re in the hospital, such as surgical site infections or the antibiotic-resistant staph infection known as MRSA. (The full name of MRSA is the methicillin-resistant staphyloccocus aureus infection).
HAIs prompted some public outrage, both nationally and in California, and public health was charged doing something about it.
A year from now, state officials expect to have enough consistently compiled data to provide valid comparisons, officials said.
Brown Takes the Oath of Office, Again
In a way, you could say there were three former governors of California on hand for yesterday’s inauguration ceremony: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gray Davis and… Jerry Brown.
It was the third time Brown has taken the oath to be the state’s governor. He mentioned that he was happy to be following in his father’s footsteps as governor “and, 36 years after my first inauguration as governor, even follow in my own,” he said.
At the end of his brief 17-minute speech, Brown summed it up this way: “Like our song says,” he said, “California, here I come, right back where I started from!”
Health Care Team Hits Ground Running
Long before today’s inauguration of Jerry Brown, the new governor’s interest in health care policy has been clear.
He appointed a new Secretary of Health and Human Services almost a month ago, back on Dec. 7, naming Diana Dooley for the job. Dooley also will serve on the new and powerful Health Benefits Exchange Board, along with two members appointed last week by outgoing Governor Schwarzenegger — including the woman Dooley replaced at HHS, Kim Belshé.
According to Dooley, there has been a high level of cooperation between the two administrations on health care reform and policy.
The first thing to know is AB 39 by Jim Beall (D-San Jose) is really AB 3632.
The new bill, to be heard when the Legislature goes back to work Jan. 3, was written to replace money appropriated this year by the old bill (AB 3632), which was vetoed by Governor Schwarzenegger and his blue pencil at the end of the last session.
That’s the simple part. Explaining just what that money is for, that’s a little tougher.
Driver’s License Numbers Among Lost Records
The California Department of Public Health has never had the kind of loss of medical records that it had yesterday, according to Kevin Reilly, Chief Deputy for Policy and Programs at CDPH.
“We’ve had much smaller instances where a laptop was stolen,” Reilly said. “But nothing like this.”
A magnetic tape was mailed to the Capitol from West Covina (near Los Angeles), but when it arrived in Sacramento, it was just an empty envelope.
Dooley Hopeful, Realistic on Health Care Changes
California’s recently appointed secretary of Health and Human Services, Diana Dooley, sat down with us this week to talk about the present and future of health care in California. The full story and interview will appear Thursday in California Healthline’s Feature section.
Dooley knows this is a pivotal time in California’s history in terms of health care policy. As the first in the nation to start a health benefits exchange as mandated under the health reform law, California is poised not only to revamp its own complicated and arcane health care system, but also possibly to influence the way the rest of the nation approaches health reform.
But how all of that will play out over the next three or four years is not the only thing on the new secretary’s plate.
Integrated Care at Heart of Health Reform?
As pressure ramps up to reduce health care costs and increase quality, there is a more pressing need for physicians and hospitals to work collaboratively. That was the word from Laura Jacobs of the Camden Group, who presented the core ideas at a recent briefing sponsored by the California HealthCare Foundation, which publishes California Healthline.
“The Affordable Care Act has certainly been an accelerator for the trend we’ve seen in physician-hospital integration,” Jacobs said. “Payment reform, which is an inherent part of the ACA, is one of the things that’s driving this acceleration, and in some ways modification, of the ways physicians and hospitals are integrated.”
In the recent past, she said, physicians had independent practices, and hospitals were concerned with operating their facilities. But with the introduction of managed care, physicians banded into group practices as a way to share risk, she said. Those practices, and the HMOs they dealt with, created a different relationship with hospitals.