Center in the News

Clinical and public health professionals have been gearing up to take care of the growing aging population, yet not much is known on how best to support the needs of older adults,” Riti Shimkhada, PhD, a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told Healio.

A recent UCLA health policy research brief found that 94 percent of Californians have some form of health coverage as of 2021.

Because data on Asian Americans remain aggregated, knowledge about FilAm issues goes widely unnoticed. At a surface level, Asian Americans appear healthier than Whites, lending credence that Asian Americans can be deemphasized in research, funding, and medical attention or interventions.

The MolinaCares Accord ("MolinaCares"), in collaboration with Molina Healthcare of California ("Molina"), today announced a $125,000 grant to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research (CHPR) to engage a diverse group of UCLA graduate students in developing solutions to California’s most pressing health equity concerns through the Health Equity Challenge. This grant is the latest partnership in the $1.6 million MolinaCares California Equity and Accessibility Initiative, launched in 2021 to advance health equity throughout the state.

If the California Assembly bill promising government-run health insurance coverage for all becomes law, it would radically change the pecking order for health care workers, the companies that employ them and the patients they serve, according to health policy expert Jack Needleman. Primary care physicians would command better pay, for instance, while specialists would likely see the so-called single-payer system created by the proposed law push back on their rates, said Needleman, chair of the Department of Health Policy and Management at University of California, Los Angeles.

Findings from the 2020 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) suggest that among Asian adults, unfair treatment due to race or ethnicity played a bigger role in food insecurity than for the overall California population.

Among Asians, those reporting unfair treatment because of race or ethnicity experienced food insecurity at 1.5 times the rate than those not treated unfairly, according to CHIS, which is conducted by UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research and is the country’s largest statewide health survey. The CHIS is done online or by phone in several Asian languages: Chinese

Pilot efforts to improve care coordination for California Medi-Cal beneficiaries with historically poor health outcomes, including many individuals with serious mental illness, appear to have weathered the initial challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. A report released this month by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research states that by the end of 2020, specialty and primary care services for these populations had returned to pre-pandemic levels.

There are people who practice specialized medicine who are often discouraged by the fees that Medi-Cal pays from locating in places where Medi-Cal patients live or taking Medi-Cal patients on if they can avoid them,” Needleman said. “By raising the payments for lower income people, for those who historically have been...on Medi-Cal or those who've been uninsured, you create a more attractive environment for some people to go practice where they otherwise wouldn't have."

As of 2021, 94 percent of Californians had health insurance, according to a report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

But Nadereh Pourat, director of the Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, said if CalCare is implemented well, it could be even more financially beneficial than the current system. A comprehensive system in which everyone is equally covered brings equality and simplicity, two attributes the current system does not offer.

“If you look at the big picture, if you get a product like CalCare that’s really comprehensive and covers everything, and you don’t have any cost sharing, why wouldn’t you go for a better product?” Pourat said.