Center in the News
Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are widely known to have harmful impacts on mental health, but a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has revealed large disparities in rates of serious psychological distress across immigrant subgroups in California.
Language barriers like these can lead to serious medical mistakes. They’re also hurdles for people who don’t speak English efficiently trying to access basic health care ... research shows that as the Latino population continues to increase in California, the number of Latino physicians who are culturally competent and speak Spanish is not meeting the demand. Arturo Vargas Bustamante, a health policy professor at UCLA’s School of Public Health, co-authored a report on this issue, The Latino Physician Crisis.
What Republicans such as Trump or DeSantis might try to do with the ACA remains to be seen. A repeal of the law could have far-reaching effects.
"About 55 million Americans would suddenly be uninsured, and insurance companies would once again be allowed to deny health insurance, or charge substantially higher premiums, to anyone with a pre-existing condition," said Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "This may be the world ideologues want us to live in, but it would be a public health disaster."
The winter version of PAD provides extended hours and free recreational activities at 31 LA County parks, including snow days, sports, exercise classes, dancing, healthy cooking classes, movies, concerts, computer courses, health outreach, and social service resource fairs. According to a recent evaluation by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, 92 percent of people who attended a nighttime events program in L.A. County parks in the summer of 2022 felt safe. The program was also highly rated by attendees for giving them the chance to spend quality time with family.
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.