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California Health Report
Opinion: Doctors Are Infrastructure
Our health care system needs to be examined. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed immense inequities across our health care systems, from coverage gaps to preexisting health conditions. The pandemic has also inspired us to be more forward looking and to take a real look—not just at what’s in front of us but also at how we can look beyond to address needs now so they don’t intensify problems later.
Opinion: Why This Teacher Supports Bill to Improve Teen Mental Health
The COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the mental health crisis facing California’s youth. The California Mental Health Services Oversight & Accountability Commission recently reported that 1 in 6 high school students considered suicide in the past year.The rates are even more dire when you look specifically at LGBTQ+ communities, where 1 in 3 high school students have had suicidal ideations. As a teacher, I see these numbers play out daily in my classroom.
Growing Up is Hard, Especially for People with Disabilities
The way 25-year-old Essence Guss of Pomona describes growing up captures the way many young people feel about the transition. “Being an adult is hard,” she said. But along with the typical challenges of “adulting,” as millennials often call it, like working and paying rent, Guss has cerebral palsy and related conditions including an intellectual delay, seizures and deafness in her left ear. She also has PTSD and severe anxiety.
Analysis: Want a Mostly Normal School Year? Get Kids to Wear Masks!
My 10-year-old son has serious, medically intensive disabilities. Due to a genetic syndrome that affected the growth of his airway, he has a tracheostomy. He also uses a ventilator—a machine that breathes for him—at night. The nature of his disabilities makes him extremely vulnerable to serious respiratory infections. With a tracheostomy, the germs that would normally get caught by the upper respiratory system have a first-class ticket straight into the lungs. The kind of germs that give other kids the sniffles land my son in the pediatric intensive care unit with pneumonia. As a result, our family has been very cautious about COVID-19 because our son is at risk of serious complications.
The Promise and Limits of Restorative Justice for Youth
First, they stare. They are sitting, face-to-face, in a cinder block box of a room designed for attorney visits. It stinks of sweat and fear. The prisoner — a young man who as a teen took part in a Salinas robbery that ended with rape and murder — waits nervously.
Analysis: It’s Time to End the Racially Unjust Medical Debt Crisis
It’s the kind of case attorney Helen Tran deals with all too often. An Asian-American small business owner came into her office at Neighborhood Legal Services in Los Angeles begging for help with a surprise, five-figure medical bill. The woman had health insurance. Yet, due to a mix-up caused by...
Opinion: Investing in ‘Public Health, Health Equity and Racial Justice’ Is the Key to Pandemic Recovery
It’s been over a year since the COVID-19 pandemic began. A severely underfunded public health system, pervasive health disparities and systemic racism left many Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities devastated. Even though mask mandates are now only in effect in select California counties, communities of color in the state are far from full health and economic recovery.
Opinion: Newsom Plan Responds to Crisis, Supports Vulnerable Youth
While the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our oldest Californians is well known, the pandemic also has caused widespread emotional suffering among California’s children and youth. One in four young adults between 18 and 24 have considered suicide because of the pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego attributes a 25 percent increase in mental health emergency room visits to the effects of the pandemic.
The Pandemic Spurred a Domestic Violence Epidemic. It’s Not Over Yet.
For Lydia, 40, of southeast Los Angeles County, there was nothing safe about staying at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being home meant being stuck with her abusive husband who beat her and tried to control her every move. The abuse predated the pandemic – her three children went to live with a family member in 2018 because of it. But when Lydia’s husband lost his job because of the shutdown, he became angry and bored, and the violence escalated. Every day, he would surveil Lydia over Bluetooth while she continued to work her job at a trucking company. He’d wait to make sure she arrived home immediately afterward, without time to stop anywhere on the way. When she walked in the door, he’d take away her cell phone, paycheck and keys. And when he got upset—which happened ever more frequently as the pandemic wore on—he became dangerously violent, Lydia said.
Opinion: Dialectical Behavioral Therapy Is Helping Young People Find Purpose During the Pandemic
During my nearly 15 years as an adolescent psychiatrist, I have worked with hundreds of young people and their families seeking a path to mental health through problem-solving, relationship and communication tools—and when appropriate—medication. But, until last year, I had not seen hopelessness so prevalent in young people. Both living...
Opinion: Federal Case Threatens California Dialysis Patients’ Access to Health Insurance
A 2019 law that imperils dialysis patients’ access to healthcare and may drive thousands of Californians into medical bankruptcy is not dead. In Jane Doe, et al. v. Rob Bonta, et al. (AKA Jane Doe, et al. v. Xavier Becerra, et al.), a case that will affect thousands of low-income California residents, the federal court placed a preliminary injunction on the law in December 2019, just before it was scheduled to go into effect. With states and counties now relaxing their public health orders, the court is likely to rule on Assembly Bill 290 this summer.
Analysis: Care for Children with Disabilities Is Infrastructure, Too. Let’s Invest in it.
Infrastructure calls to mind big, physical structures—roads, bridges and buses—that make it possible for people to get around and for society to function. But infrastructure is also the behind-the-scenes programs that make day-to-day life manageable for ordinary people, such as services and supports for children with disabilities and their families. These include in-home nursing programs that allow kids with special health care needs to live at home and their parents to care for them without going bankrupt or experiencing exhaustion.
Opinion: Countering COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy Among Pregnant African Americans
For the past 15 months, our country has faced an unprecedented public health crisis as COVID-19 has infected over 33 million Americans and claimed almost 600,000 lives. African Americans in particular are experiencing COVID-19 death tolls exceeding 1 in 800 nationally, compared to white Americans who are experiencing a death toll of 1 in 3,125 nationally. California alone accounts for 11 percent of COVID-19 cases, and African American communities (6 percent of the state’s population) have been hit especially hard, accounting for 7.4 percent of deaths. As vaccines have become widely available, these numbers are decreasing but not fast enough—especially among pregnant people.
Opinion: We Need Clear, Fact-Based Guidance to Recover from Trump’s Public Charge Rule
This spring, a long-sought, hard-fought change in immigration policy became a reality: The Trump-era public charge rule was permanently blocked nationwide. This means immigrants seeking lawful permanent residency in the United States can access services for which they’re eligible, without affecting their immigration status. While we celebrate this win—for inclusion, for fairness and for our shared humanity—we must do more.
Analysis: The Case for Defunding the Police
The phrase “defund the police” has become a rallying cry in the wake of last summer’s uprising for racial justice and a radical reimagining of policing and public safety. While the concept has been on the minds of racial justice advocates since at least 2016, it has raised some concerns and confusion for those less familiar with the movement.
Some Kids in Long-Term Care Facilities Didn’t See Parents for More Than a Year
When staff at All Saints Healthcare in North Hollywood told Nicole and Les Kozma that they could no longer visit their 1-year-old daughter, Ryanne, inside the facility’s pediatric nursing unit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the couple assumed the restrictions would be fleeting. For months, they’d traveled to the facility...
Opinion: California Has Opportunity to Close Racial Health Gap
The COVID-19 pandemic continues to highlight what has been true for generations: inequality is killing Black Californians. At its peak, Black people were dying from COVID-19 at a rate nearly double our share of the state’s population. This horrifying fact should come as no surprise after decades of systemic racism and inaction. The Black community currently has a higher burden of chronic disease than our peers and less access to resources, including health care. Contrary to popular belief, this is not attributable to poverty. Regardless of income level, Black Californians have nearly six years shorter-than-average life expectancies.
Opinion: Accurate Patient Data is Key to Reducing Health Disparities, Improving Care
To transform the future of health care, we must understand current care. This is especially true when it comes to addressing the multiple socioeconomic and other factors that drive health disparities, which the COVID-19 pandemic has amplified. Right now, our ability to reduce these inequities and increase quality of care for those most in need is limited because we do not have accurate and complete information about how our most vulnerable patients access health care. We also lack full insight into the types of conditions that impact vulnerable patients.
Volunteer Pilots Connect Remote Areas to Advanced Medical Treatment
Eileen Ambrosini moved to the small town of Atwater, California, in 1979. Over the next three decades she met her husband, raised her daughter, and worked as a high school French teacher, all in the heart of the state’s agricultural corridor. But when Ambrosini was diagnosed with breast cancer in...
The Central California Town That Keeps Sinking
The very ground upon which Corcoran, Calif., was built has been slowly but steadily collapsing, a situation caused primarily not by nature but agriculture. This article was produced by SJV Water, the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and The New York Times. The collaboration between SJV Water and CCIJ was led by the Institute for Nonprofit News as part of a project called “Tapped Out: Power, justice and water in the West.”
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