Latest California Healthline Stories
Health Care Issues High on Latino Community Agenda
Health care was a focal point when leaders of Latino community organizations met in Sacramento last week to launch the “California Latino Agenda,” a statewide campaign to unite leadership, establish goals and lobby for policy positions.
Assembly Approves Race, Ethnicity in Quality Reporting
The Assembly yesterday passed a bill that requires state officials to include race and ethnicity when compiling health care quality data.
AB 411 by Assembly member Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) would not create any kind of difficulty for state officials, since that data already exists, according to Pan. The point is to make state officials use it, Pan said.
“It’s similar to the way MRMIB (Managed Risk Medical Insurance Board) used to analyze Healthy Families data,” Pan said. “This is a vital thing that we need to do.”
How Exchange Hopes To Reach Enrollees
Covered California exchange officials on Tuesday awarded $37 million in outreach grants to 48 community-based organizations. Those groups all have a wide reach, and represent a much bigger bloc of community organizations, according to Peter Lee, executive director of the California Health Benefit Exchange, now known as Covered California.
“We are talking about 250 organizations within these 48 groups,” Lee said. “We encourage them to work together so what you’re seeing here is partnership.”
Lee said applicants were encouraged to aim high, because the exchange wants to reach as many people as possible and so much of the target market — a multi-cultural, low-income and multilingual population — is difficult to reach.
Increasing Medical Residencies Could Help Inland Empire
A new bill that would increase the number of medical residencies in California could help alleviate a doctor shortage in the Inland Empire, the most underserved region in the state, according to health care experts. The region has about half the number of primary care physicians it needs, according to a California HealthCare Foundation report.
State Still Looks to Dun County Funds in Medi-Cal Expansion Proposal
The optional expansion of Medi-Cal will be administered using a state-based approach rather than the county-based plan being considered by California officials, the governor said yesterday when he proposed his May revise, the mid-year revision of the state budget.
That comes as welcome news to county health officials who have cautioned for months that a county-based system would be more confusing and costly than a state-based approach.
Gov. Jerry Brown listened, apparently.
“We want to do it generously, and boldly,” Brown said of the optional expansion. “There are some questions out there, so we want to do it prudently. It’s a matter of equity, and it’s something we’ll work out over the next few years.”
What the Oregon Study Says (or Doesn’t) About Medicaid
Health care observers have claimed the results of the Oregon Health Study for their own, shaping its findings to fit their arguments about Medicaid and its expansion under Obamacare. Are the results too heavily emphasized considering the study’s limitations?
Stop-Loss Bill Heads for Senate Floor Vote
The Senate Committee on Appropriations yesterday approved a bill to ban a certain type of selection criteria when insurers issue stop-loss health care coverage to small employers.
The bill was one of a small mountain of bills before the Appropriations committee yesterday. The policy committees have finished their legislative work for this session, and bills need to either clear Appropriations this week or be put on suspense to wait for next session. The committee yesterday put 76 proposed laws on the suspense file.
Health Information Sharing Deal Announced
The health information world in California is getting more connected. Many large and small HIE networks have signed an agreement to share information, state officials announced last week at the annual HIE Summit in Sacramento.
“We have been working with the leadership of HIE around California to help them establish self-governance of exchanges across the state,” said Pamela Lane, deputy secretary of health information exchange for the state’s Health and Human Services agency.
Lane said there has been an information-sharing gap between the large HIE systems — such as Kaiser, the Veterans Administration and Sutter Health — and the smaller, community HIE systems. Getting those disparate groups to agree to share information has been difficult, she said.
$2-Per-Pack Tobacco Tax Clears First of Legislative Hurdles
A new bill proposing to raise the state tax on tobacco by $2 per pack of cigarettes cleared its first two committees in the California Legislature last week. The tax would push the price of cigarettes beyond $8 a pack and move California from 33rd in the country to fourth in tobacco taxation.
State’s Proposed Scope-of-Practice Changes Designed To Expand Access to Abortions
Assembly member Toni Atkins, Camille Giglio of the California Right To Life Committee, Sierra Harris of ACCESS Women’s Health Justice and Tracy Weitz of UC-San Francisco spoke with California Healthline about a bill that would allow some non-physician health professionals to perform a specific type of first-trimester, non-surgical abortion.