Center in the News

Wellvolution, a digital health platform by Blue Shield of California, will now be more inclusive and accessible for Spanish speakers ... Hispanic communities in California are more likely to have difficulty finding a primary care doctor or specialist than other groups, likely due to language barriers, according to data from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research as compiled by The California Health Care Almanac.

Among Latinos and Asians living in California, immigrants are less likely than citizens to own a firearm and more likely to report being afraid of becoming a victim of gun violence, according to a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "This study shows that the immigrant population's concern about gun violence is significant."

In medical research and public health in the United States, people with Asian ancestry are almost always grouped into a single racial category. They seem to be doing very well — better than white Americans in important categories.

But separate out subgroups of Asian Americans and outcomes are far poorer... In a 2020 study, Ninez Ponce, who directs UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research, found at least one disparity that was disguised by aggregation in every Asian subgroup she and her colleagues examined. “You cannot have health equity without data equity,” said Ponce. 

Researchers discovered that compared to caregivers in other surveys—such as the California Health Interview Survey and the Caregiving in the United States survey — the California Caregiver Resource Centers caregivers tended to be older (about 40% were over 65) and more diverse. Slightly fewer than half reported their race and ethnicity as other than white and non-Hispanic.

Race and ethnicity also correlate with food insecurity ... Non-citizen Asian residents at 12.5% also had greater food insecurity than whites, though U.S.-born and naturalized citizens of Asian descent did not. The situation for Black Californians was even more dire. According to numbers from UCLA’s 2022 California Health Interview Survey, 49.9% of low-income Black adults in California could not afford adequate food that year.

There's a lot of encouraging news these days in the study and treatment of lung cancer ... But there's bad news, too.

"According to the 2022 results of the California Health Interview Survey, 33.1% of Kern County adult residents who have ever smoked, reported that they smoke every day," said Jasmine Ochoa, health equity officer at the Kern County Department of Public Health.

That's more than twice the rate in the state as a whole, she said.

"I am a 100% believer in strong gun control,” Berkeley-based photographer Judy Dater told me in September shortly before the opening of The Gun Next Door, her latest exhibition at Oakland Photo Workshop ... "We really need to understand why so many people in this country feel they need to have one or two or several hundred.”

Millions of Californians live with guns in their homes: 5.2 million, to be exact, or 17.6% of all adults in the state, according to a 2021 survey conducted by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. 

In 2020, the California Health Interview Survey found that Asian hate crimes had affected about 1.5 million Asian Americans.

“What was most shocking is that 27% said that they had witnessed another Asian American Pacific Islander experiencing a hate incident,” said Ninez Ponce, chair of the UCLA’s Department of Health Policy and Management at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “These hate incidents are because of xenophobia and because people see Asians as different from themselves.”

Sean Tan, UCLA Center for Health Policy Research; Sonya Young Aadam, California Black Women’s Health Project; Dr. Mark Ghaly, California Health and Human Services Agency; Jessica Altman, Covered California; and Assemblymember Miguel Santiago at Covered California's kickoff of the 2024 open-enrollment period at the Los Angeles State Historic Park and Roundhouse Bridge.