Terra Slavin first walked into a domestic violence shelter when she was 16. In some ways, she never left.
She was there as a volunteer, but she had no idea at the time that the experience would help determine her calling.
Author: Hannah Hough
Despite having a huge increase in cases, the state office that handles complaints about health plans for low-income people hasn’t produced a quarterly report in nearly a year. The quarterly reports help officials identify large-scale problems affecting people enrolled in the health program, called Medi-Cal.
A state legislative committee ordered an audit Thursday of provider directories that are given to people in California’s low-income health program, after reports of major inaccuracies.
The California office that handles complaints from people in the state’s low-income health program has seen its monthly caseload increase by 82 percent this year compared to 2013.
The California agency that oversees the state’s low-income health plan vastly overstated the number of doctors who accepted patients through the program last year, even as the number of people enrolled was set to skyrocket under the federal Affordable Care Act, the California Health Report has found.
Nearly 25 percent fewer physicians were signed up to treat low-income patients in the state’s insurance program this spring compared to a year prior, despite the surge in patients enrolled in Medi-Cal.
On her way to her office in Oxnard, Rachel Casas drives past farmworkers bent over in the fields. Because she is a neuropsychologist, she wonders whether there are pesticides in those fields and if the chemicals may be affecting the laborers.
Consumers have been complaining this year that Covered California insurance plans have doctor’s networks that are too narrow. The doctors they want to see don’t accept the insurance, they say.
Directories of doctors given to low-income patients across California are highly inaccurate, making it difficult for them to get the health care they’re entitled to under state law, the California Health Report has found.
When Irene Gomez emigrated from Mexico at 14, she immediately began working in the strawberry fields in the Oxnard Plain. The work was exhausting, poorly paid and unreliable — but that was the least of her problems. She was also helping a friend escape from a violent relationship and was worried about living in the U.S. without legal papers. She was overwhelmed, but felt she had nowhere to turn.