Latest California Healthline Stories
Legislature Approves Health Care Bills
The days are dwindling down to a precious few. By next Tuesday, the state legislature must approve or reject all the bills on its docket.
That means it has three more days to vote.
Many bills have passed this week, but several high-profile bills are still hanging, and expected to be heard and voted on today.
Health Plan Pooling Bill Moves to Governor’s Desk
This week’s approval by the state legislature of the creation of a statewide health benefit exchange would eventually result in competition between health plans in the exchange.
A bill passed yesterday is designed to help public health plans compete more robustly with the larger private health plans, by allowing public plans to pool risk and share networks for the joint offering of health plans.
The idea of SB 56, by Sen. Elaine Alquist (D-Santa Clara) is to ensure competition and make a broader array of affordable plans available, according to John Ramey, the executive director of Local Health Plans of California.
The Decision Turf Between Care Providers and Patients
There has been a shift in medicine toward involving patients more in decisions about their own health. In an article in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association, a California physician explains how that outwardly time-consuming process could not only make patients happier with their care, but might actually save time for care providers.
Time is short for physicians, especially these days. And that’s one of the reasons the patient-doctor dynamic shifted from one extreme to another, according to Alexander Kon, who has been a pediatric intensive care physician at UC Davis (though he is soon taking his talents to San Diego, to the Naval Medical Center there).
About two decades ago, Kon said, many physicians embraced a new model of care, where the doctor provides information and leaves the final decision about treatment options up to the patient. Which is both good and bad, he said.
The long fight that is national health care reform has had one large skirmish that netted about $3 billion in reimbursement money for California.
That’s the word from the California Hospital Association (CHA), and it is the driving reason behind giving its annual Health Care Hero award to a Congressman from California, Rep. Dennis Cardoza (D-Merced).
“It’s an award to individuals who have done a particularly heroic job in health care,” Jan Emerson of the CHA said. “He played a key role in ensuring that $3 billion that was slated to go to other hospitals in other states, instead stayed in California.”
Exchange ‘Could Look Like a Large Business’
The two bills that would establish the statewide Health Insurance Benefits Exchange have not been without controversy.
In an Assembly floor vote Friday, several Republican members rose in opposition to the bill — which, in these last hurried days of bill-passing before the Aug. 31 recess, is an extremely rare event.
“I don’t believe we need the state government running a benefits exchange,” Jim Silva (R-Huntington Beach) said. “Besides, this is something we don’t need to take action on till 2014 … and I think there are much better ways than a new exchange.”
Normally Aloof, Formal Senate Plays Prank on Itself
There are a handful of legislators who push health care bills in the Assembly. Bill Emmerson (R-Bermuda Dunes), who sat on the Assembly Committee on Health, has been one of them.
But he was presenting a very different kind of bill Wednesday, a vehicle registration amnesty bill. It was one of those kind and gentle bills, with no opposition and no controversy.
So it was a bit of a shock to hear one state senate member after another stand up and vote decisively “No” on it. In a day where many bills passed without one dissent, this one failed, 2-22. It took a moment to see that many senate members were chuckling away about it.
Medi-Cal Crunch Looms for Community Clinics
The budget is about seven weeks late now. Without a budget, the state can’t keep writing Medi-Cal checks to health care providers. And that budget crunch begins today, when the last Medi-Cal checks go out to community clinics throughout California.
Without that $43 million every two weeks, those clinics will be in big trouble, according to Carmela Castellano-Garcia, president and CEO of the California Primary Care Association (CPCA).
“That means clinics are not going to receive 50% to 80% of their revenue, so they’ll be in a challenging financial situation,” Castellano-Garcia said. “This budget stalemate is going to have significant impact on them.”
Let the Tele-Doctoring Continue, Expand
From a health policy point of view, the star power was out in force at yesterday’s official inauguration of the California Telehealth Network.
Aneesh Chopra, national chief technology officer, was chatting with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. The head of health sciences and services for the UC system, Jack Stobo, was nodding at something said by Sharon Gillette, bureau chief for the FCC.
They were all out to announce the success and expansion of a telemedicine pilot project that has been running since 2007. With the help of $22 million from the FCC’s broadband initiative — one of the largest grants awarded by the agency — and another $3.6 million of corporate money pitched in by the California Emerging Technology Fund, the state officially launched its CTN agency yesterday.
Recruiting, Training More Health Care Workers
There is a dearth of health care providers in California, and the demand for more highly skilled health workers will only increase when national health care reform goes into effect. That’s the word from Tom Riley, legislative advocate for the California Academy of Family Physicians, speaking at a Senate Health Committee hearing last week.
“We think the time has come for this to be front and center in the health care debate, the workforce issue,” Riley said. “This is a terribly important thing for us to be addressing.”
The proposed law, AB 2551 by Assembly member Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), would establish the Health Workforce Development Council, a task force charged with tackling how to recruit and train a new segment of the health care workforce.
How To Make Evidence-Based Medicine Work
No one seems to understand just what evidence-based medicine is, and right now that is its biggest problem.
That was the consensus at Thursday’s conference in the Capitol Building — “Right Care, Right Time, Right Place” — put on by the New America Foundation and sponsored by the Assembly and Senate health committees.
“Clearly, over time, physicians need to learn to embrace evidence-based medicine. But more importantly, consumers need to embrace it, and understand it.” That’s according to Richard Baker, chair of the Council of Scientific Affairs for the California Medical Association and dean of the College of Medicine for Charles Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles.