Latest California Healthline Stories
Research Targets Early Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s
Last week, Laurel Beckett of UC-Davis was just back from Honolulu, where she had been presenting her work at the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease. It created quite a buzz in that segment of the research world.
“We have not had a lot of success in treatment, and usually by the time doctors have a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, there’s already a lot of damage to the brain,” Beckett said, adding, “Anytime we can move the time of diagnosis up, that gives researchers and physicians a better chance to treat it.”
Therefore, one of the goals of research has been to diagnose Alzheimer’s at a much earlier stage.
Information Exchanges Show Signs of Progress
The national effort to establish a network of health information exchanges could streamline health care costs and provide medical professionals with more timely and accurate patient information, by electronically merging information between physicians, laboratories, pharmacies and hospitals.
The goal is to have less paperwork, less duplication of services, better patient outcomes and to lower costs for everyone.
Health information exchanges have received a lot of media attention recently, but exchanges have been operating around the country for the past seven years. And the number of those information exchanges has been steadily rising every year, both nationally and in California.
Judge To Decide Sacramento Clinics’ Fate
Times are tough for Sacramento County — both for the indigent population and for the local lawmakers who have no money to care for them.
A preliminary injunction hearing will be held tomorrow (Friday) in Sacramento Superior Court to decide whether or not to lift a temporary restraining order that has kept the doors open at three public clinics in Sacramento County.
Feeling the pressure from budget cuts, the county earlier this month moved to shut down two clinics that had been open one day a week, and trim hours and operating expenses at the county’s only full-time clinic. That comes on top of the closures of two other clinics last year and another clinic in 2008.
Customer Experience Ignored in Health Care?
Health professionals gathered in San Diego this week for the annual Health Unbound Conference to discuss the latest array of promising devices for making patients’ lives better — self-monitoring devices, home telehealth, social media and other e-health tools and advances.
But here’s the thing, said one speaker at the conference: There are so many useful devices and applications being developed to help patients achieve better health and longer lives, but getting those patients to use that technology can be a huge challenge.
“In general, health is a very intangible outcome,” Elizabeth Boehm of Forrester Research said, adding, “What does it mean to be slightly healthier? You’re talking about adding years to the end of my life, but the stuff that’s unhealthy has a shorter-term payoff. It usually tastes good, feels good, supplies immediate pleasure. It’s hard to get people to engage and use those long-term tools that make their health better.”
State Makes Push for Coverage for Pregnant Women
A bill to require health insurance plans to include maternity care is on the doorstep of the Senate floor, but it will have to resolve some fiscal questions before it moves forward.
“Very simply, when women do not have maternity services as part of their heath insurance, or have maternity services that are substandard they end up going on state programs, like AIM, the Access for Infants and Mothers program, which is a subset of Medi-Cal (the state’s Medicaid program),” said bill author Hector De La Torre (D-South Gate).
“As of 2009,” he said, “about 1,400 women were enrolled with policies that did not cover maternity services, so the rest of us had to pay for it.” An even greater number had policies with high deductibles or inadequate coverage, De La Torre said, and they used state programs, as well.
Medical Professionals Make Their Mark on Reform
It was Kim Belshé, the Secretary of California Health and Human Services, who recently made an appeal for “not the politics of reform, but the policy of reform.”
What she meant is that working on the implementation of health care reform in California should be a grassroots affair — that politicians shouldn’t lead reform, but rather, health professionals should take the reins to revamp our health care system.
That’s the idea behind the town hall meeting, “Putting the Care in Obamacare,” that’s being held today (Monday) in Los Angeles, according to Leif Wellington Haase, director of the California program at New America Foundation, a nonprofit and nonpartisan group that’s putting on the conference.
Regulating Insurance Rate Hikes Could Be Costly
A funny thing happened on the way to passing a bill to regulate large health insurance rate hikes — it hit a wall of money.
The last hurdle in the state legislature for AB 2578 by Dave Jones (D-Sacramento) before getting its vote on the Senate floor was a quick stop in the Senate Committee for Appropriations. But on Thursday, the committee heard a cost analysis report presented by the Department of Managed Health Care that froze the legislation in committee — at least for now.
To implement the bill, the Department of Managed Health Care estimated the state would need to hire 110 high-priced actuaries, and an additional support staff of about 60 more people, at a cost of $23 million for the first year.
When Politics Becomes a Carnival
The annual California State Fair opened in Sacramento on Wednesday, and political activists from around the state gathered outside the Capitol Building to stage their own version of it.
They call it the Un-Fair.
Among the balloons and streamers on the South Lawn you could find the Wheel of Misfortune — where, no matter how hard you spin, the dial lands on a budget cut to a family service. There was the Pin the Tail on the Governor game, shell games for the kids and a fortune teller who apparently had a dark crystal ball and could only forecast bad outcomes.
California Put Center-Stage in National Debate
How much appetite do Californians have for ongoing talk about national health care reform? We are about to find out.
Two California members of Congress have recently proposed limiting or completely reversing the national health care reform law — which provoked an equal and opposite reaction among many state lawmakers. And it has become an issue in the race for a U.S. Senate seat in California, as well.
“I believe we should repeal the new health care law and replace it with real patient-centered reforms that reduce costs and improve access to quality care,” said Rep. Wally Herger (R-Chico).
Health Insurance Limited for Same-Sex Couples
Gay couples in California may have many of the rights of heterosexual married partners — but not when it comes to dependent health insurance coverage, according to a UCLA study released in the July issue of Health Affairs.
California is a state where registered domestic partnership laws extend marriage-like rights and responsibilities, where laws regulating health insurance and health plans require equal treatment of spouses and domestic partners.
But, according to the study, lesbian and gay couples have a difficult time collecting dependent coverage benefits outside of the public sector.