Between farm and table, a broken chain

By Daniel Weintraub

After years of being urged to “eat fresh, eat local,” residents of the Sacramento region are responding. From neighborhood dinner tables to big institutional kitchens, locally grown foods are in high demand. But every spring, locally grown produce is rotting in the fields of the small family-run farms around the region. Between that abundant supply and the strong demand, the market has broken down. There is no good way to get those crops from the farms to the people who want them at a price consumers are willing to pay.

ashby wolfe

The trouble with Medicaid

By Ashby Wolfe

A patient has asthma and needs medication to prevent a possible trip to the ER. The doctor prescribes it. But the state bureaucracy that runs the Medi-Cal program puts up a roadblock. After hours of follow-up, the doctor manages to navigate the system for her patient. The story illustrates why so many doctors have stopped taking Medi-Cal patients.

In San Francisco, a rush for health care

By Richard C. Paddock

A San Francisco clinic that serves the poor was flooded with new patients when the city created its Healthy San Francisco program. Now the doctor who runs the clinic is preaching prevention for those patients. Third in a series on universal health care in San Francisco.

Richmond searches for answers to soaring homicide rate

By Heather Gilligan

Even as murder rates are declining across California and the nation, homicide is on the rise in Richmond, the gritty industrial city on the east side of San Francisco Bay. A resident of Richmond is nearly three times as likely to be murdered as someone in Los Angeles, Sacramento or San Francisco. Now the city government, police, churches and community groups are trying new approaches to reverse the trend. 

On the line with unemployment

By Hilary Abramson

Go to your local unemployment office to get information about a claim and they will sit you at a bank of phones so you can call — the unemployment agency. You will wait on hold, and wait and wait and wait, and then get a person on the other end who will hang up on you if you make one false move. If this sounds crazy to you, read HIlary Abramson’s account of her Kafka-esque experience dealing with the EDD.

ashby wolfe

Why we need more general practice docs

By Ashby Wolfe

We are not made up of organs only. We are human. We need someone to be looking at the whole picture, someone to help us discuss end-of-life care issues with our families and elderly parents. Someone who can explain why it is important for a family member to see three different doctors to control her diabetes and heart failure. The system is too complex to assume patients can navigate the waters on their own…which may be why patients with chronic conditions often see the progression of their disease as something beyond their own control.

Bay Area planners back local fuel tax for transit

By Daniel Weintraub

Democrats in the Legislature threw a fiscal lifeline to public transit last week, bolstering financing for buses and trains at a time when the state is cutting just about everything else. But leaders of the Bay Area’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission saw the moment as a lost opportunity for fundamental change in the way California pays for public transit. They want a local sales tax on fuel.

California’s long-term unemployed: a city the size of San Francisco

By Michael Bernick

The number of long-term unemployed in California has now reached a level roughly equivalent to a city the size of San Francisco. And more and more of them are workers with backgrounds in financial services, computer operations, commercial and residential real estate and human resources. Each of these jobs usually attracts tens or hundreds of applicants when an opening is announced.

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