California Watch
News stories in this section spotlight activities in California, including actions by the state Assembly and state Senate; proposed legislation; regulators like the Department of Managed Health Care and Department of Insurance; and the state ACA exchange, Covered California.
Six months after the state restarted its health insurance eligibility process, more than 835,000 people who had their Medi-Cal terminated between June and October lost that coverage because of incomplete or missing paperwork.
Milagro, a Peruvian immigrant in Riverside County, California, has had spotty access to health care in the two decades she’s been in this country. The 48-year-old, who works as the office manager at a nonprofit, can get emergency care through a narrow set of benefits the state makes available to immigrants without legal residency. And ...
Dear Gov. Newsom: Thanks for the new laws. Thanks for the new inspectors. Thanks, I guess, for trying, even a little. But — and isn’t there always a but? — it’s not working. And it’s maddening that the fraud and abuse still plaguing California’s addiction treatment industry aren’t being exposed by California’s regulators, or California’s attorney general, ...
Hospitals and emergency rooms in California and across the nation may have to ration care by the end of the month, federal health authorities warned this week. Officials are particularly worried about an insufficient number of beds for children in pediatric hospitals and wards throughout the country as respiratory illnesses hit especially hard among Americans ...
Thousands of Californians may have to pay out-of-network medical costs to go to their nearest hospital after contract negotiations between Adventist Health and Blue Shield of California — a major health care provider and health insurer in the state, respectively — fell through last week.
California hospitals are seeing increased strain heading into the winter holiday season, with more than three-quarters of inpatient beds occupied and nearly 67% of intensive care beds in use, according to figures released Friday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But for the first time in three years, the surge is not solely ...
Mexican authorities have raided and closed 31 drug stores in the Baja California coastal city of Ensenada, after they were detected selling false or fentanyl-laced pills
Nearly two years into Gov. Gavin Newsom’s $12 billion experiment to transform California’s Medicaid program into a social services provider for the state’s most vulnerable residents, the institutions tasked with providing the new services aren’t effectively doing so, according to a survey released Tuesday. As part of the ambitious five-year initiative, called CalAIM, the state is supposed to offer ...
Respiratory virus season is ramping up in California, prompting health officials to renew their calls for residents to get vaccinated in hopes of reducing potential pressure on health systems across the state. While conditions so far are nowhere near as daunting as last autumn — when hospitals labored under the strain of a “tripledemic” spawned ...
California has a new unemployment and disability payment contractor after the state’s multi-billion-dollar pandemic fraud panic. The Employment Development Department hopes it will be the end of an era of brazen scams, which wreaked havoc for laid-off workers and fueled police busts involving stacks of ill-gotten debit cards issued at the department’s direction by then-contractor ...