California is taking the first steps toward building a far-reaching, online health insurance market overseen and regulated by the government. The exchange will be a key part of the federal health reform passed last year.
Disabled people and seniors in the Salinas area may be hit by cuts to Medi-Cal and Medicare that threaten the funding for their in-home care. Reimbursements for providers are dropping as eligibility requirements are becoming more stringent. How will service providers, the disabled and seniors cope with the cuts?
Volunteers spend three days interviewing homeless people before dawn, when experience has shown they’re easiest to locate. Questions range from age and length of time on the street to whether a person has liver disease or HIV/AIDS to injuries related to cold weather. From that, the Harvard-designed survey seeks to extrapolate respondents’ health risk, and then find housing for the most vulnerable first.
Bob Dittmar’s day begins on the roof at six in the morning. The late summer sun is punishing even at this early hour. This isn’t one of the new suburban houses that crop up quickly in the northern parts of Fresno. Dittmar is downtown, in a long-neglected area known as the Lowell neighborhood, which takes its name from the nearby elementary school, though its roots, and its struggle with poverty, go back generations.
Californians caring for aging, ill or disabled loved ones are stressed out and making some poor health choices for themselves, according a new report by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. The analysis finds that Californians looking after relatives or friends who can no longer manage on their own report higher levels of serious stress and are more likely to smoke or be obese than those who don’t shoulder the responsibilities of caregiving.
As public health budgets are slashed, and money for sex education and outreach evaporates, California public health officials are slowly introducing new technologies including texting and computer-based training to combat climbing rates of STDs.
California’s prison realignment is a confusing process, but state officials want to make one thing clear. While the prison population is being reduced starting next week, California isn’t actually releasing any prisoners early. Instead, they are shifting responsibility for “low level offenders” to the counties, which have historically had responsibility for this type of inmate. But that doesn’t mean that prison realignment has solved California’s criminal justice problems. “In the old days,” one expert says, “we used to call this ‘put the money on the stump and run.’”
Exercise helps everyone, but physical activity is especially important for people with disabilities. A annual water camp in Long Beach gives people with disabilities a chance to get out on the waves.
Aging Californians depend on a wide range of connected services – health, housing, transportation and access for the disabled – that must be better coordinated to maximize the quality of their care, according to a panel of experts at a Tuesday conference on long term services and supports.
The effects of prison realignment will remain unclear until after – perhaps months after –prison reform starts next week. Two district attorneys from very different California counties consider how AB 109 might affect them, and expert David Ball worries that no one really understands the implications of the complicated law.