Latest California Healthline Stories
Proposal Sends Shiver Through Health Agencies
The budget proposed by the governor yesterday, which includes deep cuts to health care programs in California, is unlikely to be passed in its current form, political experts said.
Legislators have made it clear that they most likely will wait for incoming Governor Jerry Brown to take office in January before taking on the latest budget shortfall. And legislative leaders have expressed support for health and human service programs: from contributing an amicus brief last week to a lawsuit that would reverse cuts in mental health programs, to lobbying for repeal of Schwarzenegger’s line-item vetoes last month of many human services programs.
But whether or not any of the proposed budget cuts happen, the latest budget reduction plan is a huge red flag to health care advocates.
Governor Transition Might Hinder Grant
The new governor takes office on Jan. 3 — but that would be too late for California to apply for a large federal innovation grant, according to a number of health care advocate groups.
“We’re in this lull period,” Lucien Wulsin of the Insure the Uninsured Project said, “with the outgoing Schwarzenegger administration and the incoming Brown, there’s this whole handoff thing.”
And since the innovation grant application has to go in by Dec. 23, Wulsin said that’s a little worrisome.
How California’s Health Care Landscape Is Shifting
At a panel discussion in Sacramento yesterday, the line of the day belonged to Louise McCarthy, head of governmental affairs for the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County.
The phrase “elephant in the room” kept coming up throughout the discussion, and usually it referred to some health care money owed and not being paid by the state.
“It’s not an elephant in the room we’re dealing with,” McCarthy said. “It’s more of a pachyderm party right now.”
Changing Health Care Role for California’s Businesses?
It’s an alarming lead statistic in a report out this week: About 20% of working Californians don’t get health care insurance through their employer.
What that means is that it’s not just the unemployed and disabled who are struggling to find health care coverage. It’s also a large number of people with jobs.
But will any of that change under the pending national health care reform law? Businesses with fewer than 50 employees won’t be required to provide health insurance. So will state lawmakers need to enact some kind of legislation to address it?
State of Nursing in the State of California
The National Summit on Advancing Health through Nursing was held in Washington, D.C., yesterday to officially launch a report called The Future of Nursing: Leading Change, Advancing Health. It listed the developments that need to happen in nursing during health care reform.
“This is the first day of the future of nursing,” Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, President and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said at yesterday’s summit. “This is the day when we fill the critical piece of the health care picture. We are here not to reform but to transform how care is delivered.”
Donna Dolinar is on the board of the California chapter of the American Nursing Association, and she was at the D.C. conference.
Going From No-Show to Showing Teeth
It was two weeks ago that the California Department of Managed Health Care was a sort of agency-non-grata at a legislative oversight hearing. The Assembly budget subcommittee hearing was targeted at the DMHC’s perceived lack of response to complaints that the insurance industry was short-changing emergency departments across the state.
When the DMHC didn’t show up to that oversight hearing, it prompted a fair share of derision and antipathy — and it confirmed emergency department officials’ fears that the agency was ignoring their complaints.
Yesterday, the agency showed that it has been listening, by levying nearly $5 million in fines on seven health care insurers.
How Stem Cell Research Might Affect Everyone
There has been much speculation about stem cell research’s potentially miraculous treatments for diabetes, AIDS and other diseases. And those possibilities are real and within reach, according to Bruce Conklin of the UCSF Gladstone research institutes. But the real reach of stem cell research might seem a little more commonplace and yet could have more benefit to more people.
“Just making better medicines all around, that’s going to be a huge benefit to the public,” Conklin said. “In my view of the biomedical revolution, that’s going to be the biggest impact overall.”
The change, he said, will be that physicians no longer would have to guess which medicines might have statistically higher or lower incidence of potentially deadly side effects.
Time Is Now for Electronic Health Records
Carmela Castellano-Garcia had a good idea of what she was going to see in the California Primary Care Association’s annual survey of clinics.
But she was a bit surprised at the degree of participation among California clinics that responded to the survey, in terms of implementing electronic health records.
“About 21% of them have already implemented EHRs,” CPCA president Castellano-Garcia said. “And of the rest, about 70% said they expect to do it in 2011.”
Report Looks at Money and the Uninsured
More need, less money — that seems to be the summary of every report on health care in California. So researcher Kiwon Yoo was somewhat surprised to see in her own report for Insure the Uninsured Project that funding for counties was not in steep decline in the years she studied, 2006 to 2009.
“There is rising unemployment and a rising number of uninsured during that time, but funding streams remain somewhat stagnant,” Yoo said. “So it was not a precipitous fall, as people thought it would be.”
In fact, the total county funding match rose 1.6 percent — that is, funding from state and federal sources actually rose slightly. “That includes money from vehicle license fees, tobacco settlement funds” and other temporary funding sources, she said. “And these numbers only go up to 2009, and some of the budget measures don’t take effect till 2011 or 2012.”
What Can Brown Do for Senior Health Issues?
Just because the California political landscape is in transition and its budget in disarray, that doesn’t mean the state still doesn’t have pressing needs and opportunities for its seniors, according to Gretchen Alkema of the SCAN Foundation, a not-for-profit that looks at long-term care issues.
“Time is of the essence,” Alkema said. “The reality is, individuals with long-term needs, that doesn’t change with the budget situation.”
So even though Jerry Brown and newly elected legislators won’t take the oath of office till January, the SCAN Foundation released a policy brief yesterday on the long-term care challenges and possible solutions for seniors in California.