Center in the News

“Using California survey data, we found that childhood lifetime asthma prevalence varied among Asian American ethnic groups, with the lowest prevalence in Korean American children and the highest prevalence in Filipino American children,” Meng Chen, MD, clinical assistant professor of allergy and immunology at Stanford University School of Medicine, told Healio.

The California Department of Health Care Services on Tuesday launched two new health services offering free telehealth to families with children up to age 25. According to the California Health Interview Survey, one of the largest state health surveys in the country, about one-third of California teens experienced serious psychological distress between 2019 and 2021, with a 20% increase in adolescent suicides.

Starting this year, California is extending its public health insurance coverage to undocumented adults between 26 and 49 years old, making the state the first to offer a comprehensive plan to those without legal status ... some researchers believe it will save the state money in the long run. But this all assumes people will sign up, said Nadereh Pourat, who heads the Center for Health Policy Research’s Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program at UCLA.

To little fanfare, as the new year has gotten underway, California has closed one of the largest remaining gaps in its healthcare coverage system. As of January 1, all low-income Californians, no matter their immigration status, no matter their age, qualify for healthcare coverage ... Researchers at UC Berkeley’s Labor Center and UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research estimate that by year’s end the number of working-age Californians without health coverage will have declined to roughly 2.5 million people. 

Empowering people living in Watts to become their own environmental justice advocates by training them as citizen scientists who can gather data and map hazards and assets. Offering Asian youth in the San Gabriel Valley culturally sensitive mental health and well-being lessons  that combine teachings about nutrition, sleep and regular physical activity with traditional Chinese medicine practices. These ambitious and practical ideas to narrow or eliminate longstanding disparities in health care are among those proposed by the 15 finalists in the third annual Health Equity Challenge, which is

A new study by the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law finds that there are 174,200 transgender immigrants in the United States and 41,000 transgender immigrants in California, comprising over one-quarter (27%) of the state's adult transgender population. Using data from the California Health Interview Survey, reseachers examined demographic, socioeconomic, and health characteristics of transgeneder adult immigrants in California.

Covered California leaders have stressed time and again that no one can predict when they’ll need health insurance, and Dyer’s accidents show that serious injuries can occur even as people go about the routine aspects of daily life. The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research estimates that there are 1.3 million Californians who are uninsured but qualify for subsidies with Covered California or would be eligible for Medi-Cal.

In the first quarter of this year, Medi-Cal beneficiaries filed more than 115,000 complaints about the program — over 27,000 of which were related to provider availability and timely access to care. An analysis from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that, after adjusting for socioeconomic and health status, Californians on Medi-Cal were more likely to report having no usual source of care, being told a doctor wouldn’t accept their health insurance, and having not seen a doctor in the past year.

The new UCLA policy brief shows significant mental health disparities among immigrant groups in California. Recent immigrants residing in the U.S. for less than five years experienced a 140% increase in severe psychological distress, from 5% (2015–17) to 12% (2019–21).

In San Francisco, the share of people 65 and older who said they'd used cannabis within the last month increased from 10% in 2017 (a year after marijuana was legalized in California) to 13.7% in 2022, according to the latest data from the California Health Interview Survey.