More than half of uninsured Californians qualify for either Medi-Cal coverage or subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to help pay premiums, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation report released Tuesday, KPCC’s “KPCC News” reports. Medi-Cal is California’s Medicaid program. For the state-by-state report, KFF reviewed data from the 2015 Current Population Survey Annual Social ...

Stephanie Douglas signed up for health insurance in January with the best intentions. She had suffered a stroke and needed help paying for her medicines and care. The plan she chose from the federal insurance exchange sounded affordable — $58.17 a month after the subsidy she received under the Affordable Care Act. But Ms. Douglas, ...

In a series of bundled vetoes, Gov. Jerry Brown sent a hard-to-miss weekend message to state legislators: You dropped the ball before leaving Sacramento for 2015. Brown took action on 80 bills on Saturday, signing landmark legislation on everything from voter registration to farm animal antibiotics. But in a handful of vetoes, the governor quickly ...

As large clocks around the office counted down to Election Day last year, leading physicians ditched their business meeting and marched downstairs to stuff envelopes with campaign pamphlets in a makeshift war room at the California Medical Association’s Sacramento headquarters. No issue confronting voters threatened the pocketbooks and political prestige of physicians more than Proposition ...

With the first primaries of the 2016 presidential campaign just months away, the national healthcare debate is poised to enter a new phase, more focused on consumers’ pocketbooks than on re-litigating the 5-year-old Affordable Care Act. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is campaigning on a detailed program to crack down on rising drug prices and runaway ...

Blue Shield of California has won state approval to acquire Care1st Health Plan, but had to make several concessions, including permanently relinquishing its not-for-profit tax exemption, the Los Angeles Times reports. Background Blue Shield proposed the $1.2 billion acquisition of the multi-state Medicaid insurer in December (Terhune, Los Angeles Times, 10/8). Care1st has more than ...