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.
Health insurance premiums for CalPERS members are going up next year, but rates will be lower than insurers initially requested, according to 2020 rates published Tuesday.
A California lawmaker on Tuesday made substantial changes to his contentious vaccine bill after Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state officials raised concerns that the measure was too strict and gave too much power to bureaucrats to decide which children could skip their routine shots.
Assemblyman Joaquin Arambula intends to continue pushing to expand health care options for all undocumented immigrants in California even though the state’s new $214.8 billion budget provides coverage to a fraction of them.
California lawmakers are expected to approve a state budget Thursday that would make the state the first in the nation to help middle-class consumers purchase health insurance on Covered California, the state’s health insurance exchange created under the Affordable Care Act.
Virginia Kidd has rented her apartment in midtown Sacramento for 12 years. The retired Sacramento State professor lives there with her cats and enjoys helping out at the local library.
A new state workplace retirement savings program, CalSavers, will open to an estimated 250,00 to 300,000 employers on July 1 — offering an automatic IRA payroll deduction for the 7.5 million California workers with no retirement plan on the job.
In April 2018, 9-year-old Christian Bolling was hiking with his parents and sister in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, near their home in Roanoke. While climbing some boulders, he lost his footing and fell down a rocky 20-foot drop, fracturing both bones in his lower left leg, his wrist, both sides of his nose and his skull.
In a class-action complaint filed this week in Sacramento Superior Court, two plaintiffs allege that Sutter Health is secretly sharing their medical information with Facebook, Google, Twitter and other third parties, impinging on their privacy and opening them up to targeted internet advertising.
Democrats in the state Legislature on Sunday agreed to make adults between the ages of 19 and 25 eligible for the state’s Medicaid program. Not everyone will get those benefits, only people whose incomes are low enough to qualify for the program. State officials estimate the program will cover an additional 90,000 people at a cost of $98 million.
More than 150,000 California children dropped out of federally funded health insurance programs in 2018, a trend some experts blame on the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant policies and efforts to upend the Affordable Care Act.