Archived California Healthcare News

A recent national report credits the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, for helping to reduce racial and ethnic inequalities in health insurance coverage. But Kansas has not made as much progress as other states. Before the Affordable Care Act, blacks, Hispanics, American Indians and Asian-Americans were much more likely than whites to be uninsured. But an analysis by the nonprofit Center for Global Policy Solutions shows that gap has narrowed because of the health reform law.

For the first time in three years, Blue Shield of California leads enrollment in the state’s insurance exchange while Oscar, a closely watched newcomer, experienced a slow start. The Covered California exchange said it won’t release enrollment figures by company until later this month, and insurers declined to share specifics until then.

The California Department of Public Health has confirmed that the number of hospital inspectors in the state’s most populous county will increase dramatically in the coming months.

Kansas Department of Health and Environment Secretary Susan Mosier said last week that she’s open to ideas to streamline the state\'s current backlog of Medicaid applicants, including presumed Medicaid eligibility for nursing home residents. When asked about a temporary lifeline for nursing homes drowning in uncompensated care while the department works through a computer system transition, Mosier said it was a “good concept” and that she liked the idea.

Stung by losses under the federal health law, major insurers are seeking to sharply limit how policies are sold to individuals in ways that consumer advocates say seem to discriminate against the sickest and could hold down future enrollment. In recent days Anthem, Aetna and Cigna, all among the top five health insurers, told brokers they will stop paying them sales commissions to sign up most customers who qualify for new coverage outside the normal enrollment period, according to the companies and broker documents.

A Los Angeles-based advocacy group for pediatric cancer patients has proposed a framework to cope with ongoing and future shortages of oncology drugs. The proposal, put forth by the Children\'s Oncology Group and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, suggests a combination of identifying which drugs are in shortage, evaluating the severity of the shortage, and then formulating an allocation plan for such drugs.

Lung Association Says More Progress Must Be Made On Tobacco Control

Many of California's largest cities have received failing grades in their smoking cessation and tobacco containment efforts, according to the American Lung Association.

Don’t blame suicide and substance abuse entirely for rising death rates among middle-aged white Americans, asserts a new study out last week. They’re both factors, but the bigger culprit is almost two decades of stalled progress in fighting leading causes of death — such as heart disease, diabetes and respiratory disease — according to a Commonwealth Fund analysis of data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The fund studied actual and expected death rates, and causes of death, for working-age adults from 1968 through 2014.

Where a hospital discharges a surgical patient can have a significant correlation to whether they wind up being readmitted, according to UCLA researchers. Their data, published in the most recent issue of the journal Medical Care, concluded that hospitals with shorter lengths of stays and higher readmission rates are more likely to refer patients to a skilled nursing facility as opposed to merely discharging them with home healthcare services.