Latest California Healthline Stories
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.
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.
Riverside Lobbying for Raise in State Health Care Funding
Health care and government officials in Riverside County want to adjust state reimbursement rates they say are inadequate and creating a crisis in health care access. The county has the second-lowest state reimbursement rate for health care services in California.
Big Week for Health Legislation
The Legislature returns from summer recess today and members will need to hit the ground running. The deadline for passing bills is Aug. 31, so the packed agendas of the appropriations committees, both Senate and Assembly, need to be cleared out quickly.
The Senate appropriations committee has 203 laws on its agenda for today and Assembly appropriations is hearing 241 items on Wednesday.
Many of those, approximately 77 of them, are health care bills. If these bills are approved in appropriations, they go out for a floor vote. Here are a few of them:
The Perils, Promise of Retail Clinics in California
Medical clinics in drugstores and large retail emporiums have spread slowly but surely in California, but impending changes from national health care reform could change the nascent retail clinic industry’s growth pattern. Will it get a boost, or will it slow down even further?
Think the wheels of Sacramento politics move slowly? Think again.
On Monday, when the California Legislature returns from its summer recess, the Senate Committee on Appropriations plans to conduct a session that is expected to last 12 hours — and possibly longer — when it takes up and either approves or denies 203 new laws.
If you do the math, that’s just 3 minutes and 31 seconds for each bill — to introduce, argue both sides, have questions answered and vote on each piece of legislation.
Quality Index Points Out Where California Lags
California provides poor quality health care in several categories such as respiratory care and immunization rates, according to a just-released national evaluation, which compares health quality markers from state to state.
California had high scores in home health care and maternal care. Overall, the state rating was smack in the middle of the average range.
“We are mandated to do national reports on health care quality,” spokesperson Karen Migdail of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) said. “Given the local nature of health care, states wanted to know what’s particular for their area. This provides a good snapshot of health care quality in a particular state.”
Judges Order Sacramento County to Pay Up
The showdown in court is over for now, and Sacramento County will need to come up with a better way to fund and manage its responsibility to care for the indigent and mentally ill.
That’s the word from three recent court decisions. At the end of last week, Sacramento County, which had already been hit with a temporary restraining order, accepted a longer-binding preliminary injunction to halt cuts and closures at its three public clinics, until a new plan can be worked out — one that offers better care to the county’s indigent patients.
That legal move came just one day after a U.S. District Court judge ruled last week against the county in a different court case, ordering Sacramento County to stop its plan to scale back some mental health services.
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.