The overhaul of America’s health care system may be stalled in Washington, but in San Francisco, a new method of delivering health care is already in place. Known as Healthy San Francisco, it is designed to care for the poor and under-served. It provides universal access to health care, comes with a public option, and has no exclusion for prior medical conditions.
A middle-aged man who is a life-long smoker shows up in the doctor’s office after suffering a shortness of breath. His declining health has put his job in jeopardy, but he is addicted to tobacco and unlikely to kick the habit any time soon. He is also short of money. His physician wonders whether the patient will take a generic medication she prescribes for him or return soon to the ER with another expensive-to-treat medical crisis.
The news has been full of stories in recent weeks of how Anthem Blue Cross has been trying to increase health insurance premiums by as much as 39 percent for some people who buy insurance on their own, outside of the kind of group coverage a person gets from an employer. Almost entirely unnoticed, meanwhile, has been a more newsworthy development: in a time when medical costs have been rising rapidly, premiums for many public sector workers enrolled in a Blue Shield of California HMO have actually gone down.
The Clean Slate Practice at the East Bay Community Law Center in Berkeley aims to increase employment opportunities for individuals with prior convictions by dismissing their criminal records after they demonstrate rehabilitation. The group has urged lawmakers to ‘ban the box,’ or exclude inquiries on prior convictions, on employment applications. They argue that such remedies will make our communities safer by making it easier for people with criminal records to get jobs and re-enter mainstream society.
A little more than five years ago, visions of seemingly magical stem cell cures danced in the minds of California voters. Lured by the promise of human embryonic stem cells and the intransigence of the Bush administration, Californians voted to borrow $3 billion and give it away to scientists to come up with therapies for ailments ranging from Alzheimer’s to diabetes. In approving Prop. 71, voters repudiated the Bush administration ban on funding of human embryonic stem cell research. The voter initiative also created the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, an enterprise unlike any in state history and one that is uniquely independent of the governor and the legislature. It is also an agency that is facing a new set of challenges as it enters its second five years of existence.
The Community Arts Program in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District offers free art studio space and supplies — as well as a place to get off the streets and get creative — to more than 30 people per day, five days a week. It is run by Hospitality House, a non-profit that has served the homeless and low-income populations of the Tenderloin since 1967.
In Delano, a poor, heavily agricultural, mostly Latino community, the local school district began focusing more on physical fitness about 10 years ago. Since then, they’ve seen fitness improve, but also student behavior and academic performance. Ken Dyar, a physical education teacher who inspired the change, tells the story here.
For health insurers doing business in California, this is the worst of times, politically speaking. The national movement toward health reform is coinciding with an election year in which several key California players are running for higher office, and they are all eager to put the industry in the spotlight. Combine that with rising costs (and profits), and you have a recipe for a political free-for-all. It is almost starting to feel as if health insurance is becoming the next tobacco industry — a political pariah for whom polite people simply wouldn’t work.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed budget for the coming year has serious implications for California’s low-income seniors.
According to a recent analysis by the UCLA Center for Health Policy, the proposal would dismantle California’s home- and community-based long-term care system. Full implementation of the proposed cuts would likely leave frail, low-income seniors – among the state’s most vulnerable residents – without needed support.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed eight new measures to fight childhood obesity. Among other things, the governor wants to increase access to free water for school children, eliminate sports drinks from the public schools and increase physical activity in after-school programs.