The pandemic-caused recession and a federal requirement that states keep Medicaid beneficiaries enrolled until the national emergency ends swelled the pool of people in the program by more than 9 million over the past year, according to a report released Thursday. The latest figures show Medicaid enrollment grew from 71.3 million in February 2020, when ...

The highly infectious delta coronavirus variant is rising fast in California, with cases more than doubling in the past month and tripling in one Bay Area county, according to genomic sequencing results reported by state and local public health departments. The first California cases of delta, a variant that emerged in India, were reported in ...

This week, the Standards Board of the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) adopted revisions to the COVID-19 emergency workplace rules. The changes approved at the Standards Board’s June 17 meeting make Cal/OSHA’s COVID-19 Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) more consistent with face mask guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and California ...

Research from Scotland released this week showed the variant made hospitalization more than twice as likely than for patients with the Alpha variant.

Nearly $50 billion or a third of Medicare Part D costs in 2016 were for drugs with absent cost-effectiveness analyses, according to a report from JAMA Network Open. Why it matters: The lack of a quality analysis that weighs the relative cost with outcomes of these drugs may create hurdles toward efforts aimed at addressing drug spending ...

My employee used most of her COVID-19 Supplemental Paid Sick Leave over the last couple of weeks. Now she wants to take a week’s vacation. Can I deny the vacation request since several other employees in that department, who have been working lots of extra hours to cover her missed shifts, also want to take ...