Center in the News

Advocates say that establishment medicine also must work harder for “disaggregated data,” information on smaller subgroups that provides invaluable insight on their medical needs and treatment. This information can be tougher and more time-consuming to develop and analyze — and for private and government funders to want to support. But as Ninez A. Ponce, PhD, MPP, and director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, has argued about sound medical policy making, based on hard data and factual evidence:

“We know that without data equity, we will not achieve health equity. But we also

New information from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research shows that among California adults who tested positive for COVID, those with the lowest incomes were more than twice as likely as those with the highest incomes to have experienced long COVID — in this case, symptoms of the virus that last for two months or more. The long COVID figure for those at the lowest income levels was a staggering 50%, versus a 29% average for all adults and 22% for those at the highest income levels.

The event marked the start of the 11th year of Covered California’s offering affordable, name-brand health care coverage and financial help to Californians under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. While the opportunity to get more Californians covered is tremendous, the latest data from the California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM), a model created by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, shows that significant gaps remain between those with and without insurance.

According to recent reports, there's an increasing number of baby boomers giving marijuana a whirl. There's a pretty even split of older marijuana consumers (52.3% female and 47.7% male) according to the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS).

Gen Z teens and young adults are having less sex than past generations and want less sexually explicit content shown in the media they watch, according to a study by the Center for Scholars & Storytellers at UCLA ... UCLA has been tracking youth behavioral trends for nearly a decade through its annual California Health Interview Survey, the most extensive state health report in the country.

Today SoCalGas continues to store, inject and withdraw billions of cubic feet of methane from the field, the second largest natural gas storage facility in the Western U.S. ... A team of about 50 UCLA researchers said they would study the effects of the leak on the health of residents near the Aliso Canyon field. Their team will examine “thousands of pollutants in people’s blood and blood of babies at birth, to look for unexpected differences in the blood of people in the community compared to those outside the affected area.

Dozens of area residents recently participated in a one-day walk-in vaccine clinic in Pacoima offering free basic health screenings, flu shots and the newest COVID-19 vaccine. Getting vaccinated may also help reduce the prevalence of “long COVID,” which is described as lingering or long-term symptoms of COVID following an infection. According to data from the 2022 California Health Interview Survey, nearly 1 in 3 adults in California who have had COVID-19 experienced symptoms of long COVID. 

Although racism has been declared a public health emergency by many areas across the U.S., eliminating it is another, much more complex matter, according to experts at Health Affairs. 1 in 4 low-income Asian Americans in California experienced food insecurity, according to a study that analyzed data from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS). It included data for low-income AAPIs, including Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, South Asian, and Vietnamese, from 2011 to 2020.

More than 75,000 unionized Kaiser Permanente employees are returning to work after a historic three-day strike. But an even bigger, longer work stoppage could be just around the corner ... Gerald Kominski, a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said he believes the health care industry and its workers have yet to rebound from the pandemic.

“The fact that there’s burnout and problems with retention and recruiting because of the work environment is, in my opinion, probably one of the longer-term consequences of the pandemic,” he said.

An increasing number of low-income, working-age Californians are facing challenges accessing nutritious and affordable food, as per a study released by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.