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.
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.
Some say that lifting California’s ban on hospitals hiring doctors directly would help limit the shortage of physicians in rural and inner city areas. But the idea would actually make things worse.
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.
Aurelio Duran has always known he is lucky to live in San Francisco. At first, it was because he loved the city and its music scene. Today, it is also because San Francisco offers universal health care.
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.
With money raised from outside grants, government funding and other resources, Grant High School in Sacramento’s Del Paso Heights neighborhood has been able to run an edible garden and kitchen on campus. But the program is constantly threatened by scarce resources.
The East Oakland Boxing Association is about more than boxing. The center also has a youth internship program that trains young people in skills that could help them get a job or start a business. Recently, a group of youth interns worked with another nonprofit to overhaul the center’s water use and improve its water conservation.
California’s 23-campus state university system can’t seem to function as it is currently structured. The system’s centralized administration is doing more harm than good. Maybe we should blow it apart and let each campus control its own future.
Anthem Blue Cross has been under scrutiny for its recent rate hikes. But that scrutiny should go beyond the rate hikes to their overall business practices—and the broken health system that rewards bad behavior. The company has perfected a business model based on collecting premiums from the healthy and avoiding as much as possible actually providing coverage to those who are sick.