California Watch

All five members of the Wadstein family have Covered California’s most comprehensive — and expensive — level of health insurance, even though the two youngest children are the only ones who need that kind of plan.

At a time when health care spending seems only to go up, an initiative in California has slashed the prices of many common procedures.

The region's average penalty was just over one-half of 1 percent of total Medicare reimbursements; last year it was one-third of 1 percent. Still, that's lower than the national average, says Jordan Rau, a Kaiser Health News journalist who interpreted the annual Medicare data.

Last fall, a bladder condition forced Carmen Anguiano to leave her job at a packing shed in Salinas, a farming community off California’s Central Coast.

Tens of thousands more immigrant children in California are receiving full Medi-Cal benefits just a few months after a state law took effect that expanded their access to the government-subsidized health program.

Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange, has released a draft of a waiver under Obamacare that must be approved by the federal government before the exchange can begin selling health plans to undocumented immigrants.

The federal government’s readmission penalties on hospitals will reach a new high as Medicare withholds more than half a billion dollars in payments over the next year, records released Tuesday show.

It is no secret that the cost and quality of health care can vary greatly within a state as large as California. But by how much?

For most of my adult life, I’ve picked my health insurance based on one simple standard: Does my beloved primary care physician participate in the plan?

Donna Nickerson spent her last working years as the activity and social services director at a Turlock, Calif., nursing home.