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.
Hospitals in the heart of California’s Central Valley are running out of beds in their intensive care units, state officials announced Friday, as a more contagious version of the coronavirus continues to spread primarily among the unvaccinated population.
An Alameda County Superior Court judge on Friday struck down Proposition 22, the 2020 voter-approved initiative that allows ride-hailing companies to classify their drivers as independent contractors. In a 12-page ruling, Judge Frank Roesch wrote that a provision of the tech industry-backed law illegally infringes on the Legislature’s constitutional authority to decide which workers must be ...
Democratic lawmakers have dropped a controversial proposal to mandate vaccines in the state, a move that would have been challenging to pass in the final weeks of the legislative session and was already providing fodder for the upcoming recall election.
Disney has reached a deal with its unions to require all of its unionized employees working at Walt Disney World in Florida to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 by October 22, 2021. The move comes nearly a month after Disney mandated that all of its salaried and non-union hourly employees in the U.S. needed to be fully ...
A California agency didn’t properly distribute federal relief funds meant to help homeless residents during the coronavirus pandemic, and the mismanagement was so prolonged that local organizations may lose the money because of missed deadlines, auditors said Tuesday. After receiving $316 million under the federal CARES Act to reduce the impact of COVID-19 on unhoused ...
California health officials Wednesday said they will expand the requirement for vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test for those attending large indoor events as the state continues to battle rising infections from the highly contagious delta variant of the virus.
Scripps Health has begun delaying some medical procedures and is considering consolidating some of its outpatient locations due to a shortage of qualified workers even as COVID-19 continues to increase demand for hospital beds, officials said. Chris Van Gorder, the health system’s chief executive officer, said in an email that the number of delayed operations ...
Everyone who works in the California Assembly must receive the coronavirus vaccine or risk losing their job, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon said. Rendon, a Democrat from Los Angeles, announced the policy on Monday following multiple cases among employees last month, including people who have already been fully vaccinated and wear masks while in the building. ...
San Francisco will reopen a mass coronavirus testing site in SoMa on Wednesday amid a troubling rise in cases — mostly among the unvaccinated — and a surge in demand for tests. The site at Seventh and Brannan streets will be able to administer 500 tests per day from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., seven ...
California Gov. Gavin Newsom once backed single-payer medical coverage, but he’s retreated into incremental addition of Californians to the state’s Medi-Cal program.