Latest California Healthline Stories
Dooley Named Interim Chair of Exchange Board
About 150 people crammed an auditorium in Sacramento to be part of history: The California Health Benefits Exchange board met for the first time — the initial big step toward implementing the first reform-prompted insurance exchange in the nation.
“If we succeed, we will set the health care reform agenda for the rest of the nation,” board member Susan Kennedy said. “If we fail, we will precipitate the downfall of it nationally. And we are fully committed to seeing it succeed.”
The first day of the board was a busy one.
Authorization Delays Targeted by Senate Bill
The Senate Committee on Health approved a bill last week that would cap administrative delay at 48 hours for prescription authorization.
The reasoning is simple behind SB 866 by Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina), according to Liz Helms, chair of the California Chronic Care Coalition.
“In representing more than 16 million people with chronic conditions in California, you can imagine how many medications that these people are taking,” Helms said, “and what a barrage of prior authorizations that face them when they’re trying to get their medication in a timely manner.”
Planners of a new congregate care facility in Santa Barbara who want to build an 18-bed facility needed a waiver from the state to go beyond the area’s 12-bed limit. The state denied the waiver.
Now comes SB 177 by Tony Strickland (R-Moorpark), which would reclassify the area so the new facility can have 18 beds rather than its current 12-bed allowance.
“This is a bill that lowers the population threshold from 500,000 to 400,000 that triggers the 12-bed limit,” Strickland said.
Research Geared to Real-World Results
Francis Collins is on the cusp of something big. Several somethings big.
Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told journalists about a number of possible breakthroughs in clinical and policy breakthroughs during the Association of Health Care Journalists annual conference in Philadelphia.
“This is a golden era in terms of understanding disease,” Collins said. “But there is still a daunting gap between fundamental knowledge and application of that knowledge.”
New Senior Home Worker Law: Protection or Intrusion?
A vast workforce in California has gone unregulated and unmonitored — and that could be a danger to the seniors they are supposed to help.
That’s the gist of a new law passed this week by the Senate Committee on Health. SB 411 by Curren Price (D-Inglewood), the Home Care Service Act of 2011, would require background checks and elementary care instruction for all workers who help out in seniors’ homes.
“Without background checks or training, anyone can be a home health worker,” Price said. “And that could leave some seniors vulnerable to fraud and abuse.”
Trying To Bridge Gap Between Direct Hiring, Access
It’s a bill that keeps coming up — by the same author three years in a row, and in three different forms in the previous legislative session. But this time around, Assembly member Sandré Swanson (D-Alameda) swears it will be different.
And for one day, at least, it was.
Swanson’s bill, AB 1360, on Monday passed out of the Assembly Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection on a 5-3 vote. It now heads to the health committee. It’s a bill that attempts to address the shortage of physicians in underserved and rural areas by allowing some hospitals in those districts to hire them directly. The idea is medical facilities would be better able to attract physicians — particularly primary care doctors — if they were allowed to negotiate directly with them.
Gay and Lesbian Health Bills in Committee
Recent research by UCLA and UCSF highlighted an area of study that has not received much attention — the health risks and challenges of the general lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community.
Now the state Legislature is considering two bills that try to address those needs.
AB 673 by John Pérez (D-Los Angeles) would require the state’s Office of Multicultural Health to include LGBT patients in their duties. And SB 747 by Christine Kehoe (D-San Diego) would require medical providers to take a 2- to 5-hour course on gender issues.
Four Is a Quorum — Exchange Board Gets To Work
Darrell Steinberg can take as long as he wants.
The Senate Rules Committee, headed by Steinberg, will appoint the fifth and final member of the California Health Benefit Exchange board, but the rest of the board has decided it needs to get started.
The exchange board’s first public meeting is scheduled Apr. 20, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Goldberg Auditorium at the Franchise Tax Board building on Butterfield Drive in Sacramento.
Selling Exchange as ‘El Mercado’
The Latino population will be a vital element of the new health exchange and a special effort should be made to involve them in it, according to Chad Silva of Latino Coalition for a Healthy California.
“As Latinos go in California, so will go California,” Silva said. “It’s really important that linguistic and cultural competency has to be structurally built into the exchange.”
Silva was part of a panel discussion on exchange strategy in Sacramento last week. He pointed out that projections point to a 52% Latino majority in California by 2050, and that the state is already one of the most diverse in the nation. He said the exchange would do well to court those consumers.
Direct Hiring, Physical Therapist Issue Head CMA List
During the California Medical Association’s 37th Annual Legislative Leadership Conference this week in Sacramento, the organization outlined some of the legislation it would fight for this year — and legislation it would fight against.
“Sometimes it feels like Groundhog Day around here,” CMA legislative analyst Jodi Hicks said. “Every year, it seems, we have this discussion about a plan to have some kind of direct hiring of physicians, and what that should look like.”
Last year, three different bills were proposed on the issue. Two new bills have been proposed this year to allow direct hiring of physicians by hospitals, in an effort to increase the number of primary care physicians working in rural and underserved areas in California.