Latest California Healthline Stories
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.
San Diego Embarks On 10-Year Trek Toward Better Health
With the support of a $16.1 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant, San Diego is reshaping public health and the design of its care delivery system to meet future health challenges and reduce the burden of chronic disease.
Committees Move Health Bills Forward
It is sausage-making time in Sacramento.
It’s the time where intense behind-the-scenes lobbying is going on over the many dozens of bills being held in suspense in the Assembly and Senate appropriations committees.
These are bills that require a certain amount of funding, so they can’t all go on to a floor vote in the state legislature. As one staffer put it, critical decisions have to be made here, because the state has more bills than money.
ED Crunch Not Necessarily Medicaid, Uninsured Issue
A study released yesterday by UC San Francisco showed a 23% increase in the number of people visiting U.S. hospital emergency departments over the past decade. Those numbers match a CDC report that came out a week ago.
The commonly held view is that rising numbers of uninsured patients and declining Medicaid reimbursements account for the spike in emergency room visits.
Not so fast, Angela Gardner of the American College of Emergency Physicians said.
California Clinics Launch Educational Campaign
California clinics and community health centers this week launched a statewide educational campaign to increase understanding and support for national health care reform.
When is a state tax not a state tax?
In California, when the going gets tough, the tough come up with a complicated, arcane funding solution.
To put it in the simplest terms possible, the state doesn’t have enough dollars in its budget, so it wants more federal dollars. And to get more federal matching dollars for the In-Home Supportive Services program, the state is planning to levy a 6% sales tax.
On itself. Which it will pay — to itself.
Will ACOs Be A-OK? Model Stirs Hopes, Questions
Accountable care organizations, or ACOs, are the most-discussed acronym-cum-health care payment model since HMOs. As providers across the nation rush to adopt the concept, is California poised to be a leader?
New Rules Requiring Health Insurers To Offer Preventive Services May Help Remove Barriers
Ned Calonge of the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Tom Hubbard of the New England Healthcare Institute and Jerry Kominski of UCLA’s School of Public Health discussed the new rules with California Healthline.
Law Takes Aim at Crowded Emergency Departments
California’s emergency departments are packed. As the ranks of the uninsured and underinsured across the state have grown, and their health problems have tended to fester and grow more acute, patients have been heading to emergency rooms in record numbers.
That means wait times have become much longer in emergency departments, and patient care is more likely to be compromised under the crush of increased demand.
A bill to address that problem — AB 2153 by Assembly member Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) — is one Senate floor vote away from going to the governor’s desk.