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.
California’s unemployment rate held steady in January as the nation’s most populous state added 53,600 jobs in a sign the economy is slowly returning to pre-pandemic levels.
Now, instead of relying on the market or the courts to keep health care prices in check, California Gov. Gavin Newsom wants to order the state’s hospitals, doctors’ offices and insurance companies to keep their costs below a certain level. If they don’t, the state could impose a hefty fine.
Sacramento-based Sutter Health successfully defeated a class-action lawsuit alleging that it had used its market power to negotiate higher rates from major insurers, thereby assuring inflated premiums for roughly 3 million employers and individuals. Jurors returned a verdict Friday in the antitrust trial before Federal Magistrate Laurel Beeler in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. ...
Monday marked the first day since most schools reopened in spring 2021 that students across Los Angeles County have the option to remove their masks in class — although the L.A. Unified School District is an exception.
The California Chamber of Commerce and a coalition including numerous local chambers of commerce are supporting legislation that allows for an employee-selected flexible work schedule. AB 1761 (Voepel; R-Santee) relieves employers of the administrative cost and burden of adopting an alternative workweek schedule per division, which accommodates employees, helps retain employees, and allows the employer to invest these ...
Last spring, Lags Medical Centers, a sprawling chain of pain clinics serving more than 20,000 patients in California, abruptly shuttered amid a cloaked state investigation into “credible allegations of fraud.” Tens of thousands of patients were left scrambling for care, most of them low-income Californians covered by state and federal insurance programs. Many have struggled ...
This was supposed to be the year that low-income Californians could hire a doula to guide them through pregnancy and advocate for them in the hospital.
Millions of Californians face the prospect of losing health coverage this year as federal measures that vastly expanded the ranks of the insured amid the COVID-19 pandemic are set to expire this year.
When will workers get back into the office? My trusty spreadsheet reviewed Property Shark’s stats on statewide office-building investments, looking at last year vs. 2019. This data is one indicator one when workplace life returns to the water-cooler routine.
When Gov. Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, he promised to lower prescription drug costs for all Californians. But now, as Newsom nears the end of his first term, his ambitious ideas — such as requiring California to make its own insulin and forging drug partnerships across state lines — have failed to get off ...