Center in the News

Data from the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration and 2020 California Health Interview Survey indicate substance misuse and mental health challenges continue to rise, with 1 in 7 San Diegans ages 12 years and older reporting drug use or serious psychological distress in 2020, highlighting the need for broader, more normalized behavioral health care.

“As COVID-19 began spreading across the state in spring 2020, the California Health Interview Survey jumped into action, collecting critical data on Californians’ experiences with COVID-19, including positivity rates, views on vaccine, personal and financial impacts of the pandemic, and conflict during stay-at-home orders,” says Todd Hughes, CHIS director. “Two years later, we are continuing to add new COVID question to CHIS to provide decisionmakers with the data needed to help their communities.”

My family was just one of many who did not have secure healthcare. In the 2018 California Health Interview Survey, approximately 10% of residents within the city of Rosemead reported not having health insurance.

Enhanced premiums, which were set to run out this year, will be retained under Congress' spending bill, benefitting Covered California policyholders, said Gerald Kominski.

But a bonus premium subsidy that went into effect last year and makes health insurance affordable for many will expire at the end of the year — and time is running out for an extension. In Pennsylvania, 40,000 people would lose all of their subsidies and another 230,000 would see their subsidies pared back, according to the HHS analysis. “It’s going to be a bad thing and a huge step backward,” Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Health Policy Research, said about the prospect of premium subsidy cut. “It’s going in the wrong direction, and it’s

According to the University of California, Los Angles Center for Health Policy Research Elder Index, the basic cost of living for someone over 65 (in San Diego) is $2,531 per month — about $30,000 per year for a single adult. However, that was in 2019.

Arturo Vargas Bustamante, a senior fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for Health Policy Research, said ensuring undocumented women have access to telehealth services and are able to obtain abortion pills at a low cost could be a solution. But he said health organizations will need to work hard to win the trust of these women, who might fear their information will land in the hands of law enforcement and be used to deport them. "We need to use trusting voices in the community to make undocumented women trust that potential of telehealth services," said Vargas Bustamante

A $3 million grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities will fund a Penn State-led project to determine if there are disparities in patient transfers. Other researchers on the project include ... Ninez Ponce, University of California, Los Angeles ...

State agencies collaborating with community-based organizations (CBOs) and investing in culturally competent care will improve health outcomes for Asian American (AA) and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) communities in California, according to a newly released policy report by AAPI Data, in partnership with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

California will become the first state to guarantee free health care to all low-income undocumented immigrants. The move will cover an additional 764,000 people at an eventual cost of about $2.7 billion a year. “Most people who go to the emergency room have insurance and are not worried about providing documents,” says Nadereh Pourat, Ph.D. director of research at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and a member of UCLA’s Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center Division of Cancer Prevention and Research. On the other hand, “the undocumented who end up in the emergency room have often