Center in the News

"You're more likely to see in racial and ethnic minorities that the kind of insurers near the end of their life are going to be a function of the type of employment and resources they had earlier in their life,"" Mays said. Examples include past employment that paid hourly wages and didn't offer benefits, or not being able to buy long-term care insurance.

""At the end of their lives and when they are utilizing these care facilities, those earlier inequities get played out again later in what it is that they have access to,"" Mays explained.

One California institution, on the other hand, has been asking such questions in the California Health Interview Survey, an ongoing effort interviewing 20,000 Californians each year about several dozen topics from internet use and difficulty finding health insurance to mental health care and asthma. The CHIS is conducted by the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA, in collaboration with the California Department of Public Health and the Department of Health Care Services. One such study titled ""Gaps in Health Care Access and Health Insurance Among LGBT Populations in California"" found

It is estimated that about 3.2 million Californians will be uninsured this year, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the UC Berkeley Labor Center.

The rate of depression and anxiety has doubled among college students over the past decade, according to a Healthy Minds Study conducted in part by Daniel Eisenberg, Professor of Health Policy and Management at UCLA.

Americans spend more on health care than any other people — about one-sixth of our nation’s GDP. According to Thomas Rice, Ph.D., at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, our health care expenses are double that of other wealthy nations, like Germany, Japan and the U.K.

“We spend over $4 trillion in the United States each year on health care. It's a large chunk of the entire world spending on health care, around 40%. But if you look at it per person, we spend about $12,500 per person per year on health care,"" he told NBCLX.

Before COVID began spreading, there was a demand for more granular data on race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. With the data collection challenges that occurred during the pandemic, identity data became even more sparse, leading to more inequities. In addition to needing more resources to collect that kind of information, I also think there needs to be investment in NCHS surveys, because they are a portal into what pains Americans are experiencing.

“This is a great achievement and it is absolutely amazing, but there will still be some who will remain uninsured,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, health policy professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “It’s not universal health care, but the situation for many immigrants in California will be much better.”

In 2023, after Medi-Cal expands to cover undocumented immigrants 50 and older, about 3.2 million people will remain uninsured in California, according to researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Of those, 1.16 million will

These barriers include a lack of timely access to needed care, not having a usual source of care, having trouble finding providers and experiencing unfair treatment, according to researchers from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research and Williams Institute who conducted the study.

Using data from the health policy center’s California Health Interview Survey from 2015 to 2020, the researchers tracked health care access and insurance coverage by sexual orientation and gender identity. They found that bisexual men and women were the most likely of all groups to report not having a usual

“We still have growing death rates and case rates. How can we move forward in the pandemic when we’re still suffering?” said Karla Thomas, policy director for the UCLA Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander COVID-19 Data Policy Lab.

Throughout the pandemic, Pacific Islanders have been hit the hardest by COVID-19. Their mortality rate is nearly twice that of the statewide rate and nearly six times higher than the lowest rate of 2.5 deaths per 100,000 people among those who identify as multi-racial.