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CalMatters

Health care report: More questions than answers

This week, Newsom’s Healthy California for All Commission delivered its report, endorsing — in concept — “unified financing” that would pay for universal health care coverage, but stopping well short of a specific proposal.

Health Magazine

How the Proposed Fix to the ACA 'Family Glitch' Will Impact Your Budget

The Biden administration has set its sights on fixing the "family glitch", a move that will have far reaching ramifications .. and result in the largest expansion of ACA coverage since the law was passed more than a decade ago. "This fix to the ACA to eliminate what's been known as the family glitch is a very big deal," Gerald Kominski, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and professor of public health, told Health. "Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a study estimating that 5.14 million people are currently affected by the family glitch...This

Gerald F. Kominski
UCLA Newsroom

Citizenship, policy barriers limit access to health care for some California Latino, Asian immigrants

RIGHTS fact sheets on Public Charge and Workplace Exclusion

MSN MX

Indocumentados mayores de 50 años ya pueden inscribirse para recibir servicios de salud gratuitos en California

Last January, Newsom revealed another proposal, to include another 700,000 undocumented people, between the ages of 26 and 49, in Medi-Cal coverage, starting in 2024. The initiative must be approved in this year's final budget. Children and young adults are already eligible. Still, researchers from the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research noted that once Medi-Cal is expanded to migrants over 50, some 3.2 million people will remain uninsured in California, of whom 1.16 Millions will be undocumented, because they earn more than the marked annual income limit.

California Simulation of Insurance Markets (CalSIM)
Seniors Matter

Asian American seniors less happy, less likely to receive support than elders of other races

“California is home to such a diverse group of Asian Americans, so with that, I think our results are very salient to other places where they’re not able to capture all the different Asian subpopulations,” Rita Shimkhada, PhD, a senior research scientist at UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and lead researcher, told SeniorsMatter. “It’s been one of the critical data sources for this body of literature out there on Asian American subgroups and Native Pacific Islander research.”

Riti Shimkhada
PBS

Inconsistent data masks the pandemic's toll on Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders

"This NHPI community is like the canary in the coal mine." "When the data first came out about COVID cases and deaths by race, ethnicity, I was, frankly, really shocked." "Other states didn't even have data on Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders."

Ninez A. Ponce
NBC News

Asian elders are less happy, get less support than elders of other races, study shows

“We know it’s a common misconception that Asians are doing better than other racial groups,” Riti Shimkhada, the study’s lead researcher and a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told NBC Asian America. “There’s much that we don’t know about our older adults, and these results show they aren’t doing as well as people may perceive."

Riti Shimkhada
The Los Angeles Times

Op-Ed: Cuts to COVID relief programs are coming. Once again Latinos will bear the brunt of the effect

Even without the cuts to COVID spending by the government, it is important to determine what policy responses are needed federally and in California to address the health inequities Latinos and other people of color face, all of which were made worse by the pandemic. We need to prevent these injustices from reoccurring should there be a new COVID-19 surge, or in the inevitable case of a new pandemic.

Arturo Vargas Bustamante
LifeHacker

All the Health Insurance Words You Need to Know But Were Too Embarrassed to Ask About

Dr. Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, is all about healthcare literacy, and he told Lifehacker why consumers need to know this stuff. Kominski not only studies the barriers to healthcare access in the country, but has experienced them firsthand. He explained that, like many people, he found one of his existing prescriptions wasn’t covered without a prior authorization when he switched to a new insurance provider. His new insurer required him to try other medications and demonstrate that they weren’t working before they would consider covering the one

Gerald F. Kominski
Kaiser Family Foundation

California Efforts to Address Behavioral Health and SDOH: A Look at Whole Person Care Pilots

As CalAIM launches, it is useful to take a closer look at the WPC pilot program and what has been learned to date from its implementation. This brief draws heavily on findings from the interim evaluation, which assessed WPC infrastructure development and implementation and analyzed whether WPC led to “better care and better health” within the first three years. In this brief, we explore key questions involving the WPC pilots, which may provide insights for other states pursuing or contemplating similar strategies for identifying and addressing the medical and non-medical or social needs of

Whole Person Care (WPC) Program Evaluation