Archived California Healthcare News

Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian, one of the largest and most respected facilities in Orange County, needed to move quickly. A big insurer had warned that its maternity costs were too high and it might be cut from the plan’s network. The reason? Too many cesarean sections.

It’s difficult to imagine that a seven-story glass building will soon take the place of what’s now a vast hole near the corner of Carnegie Avenue and 105th Street in Cleveland. But Cliff Kazmierczak, who is with Turner Construction and overseeing the transformation, points to the gray sky, tracing a silhouette with his fingertips. In two years, he says, the Cleveland Clinic’s nearly $300 million cancer center is slated to open here. “The big thing is to make the patient comfortable with the treatments that they’re going through,” he said of the building’s design. “So lighting, light colors, [and] as much natural light as possible are always very important to cancer patients.”

Under federal law, insurance plans that cover mental health must offer benefits that are on par with medical and surgical benefits. Twenty-three states also require some level of parity. The federal law, approved in 2008, and most of the state ones bar insurers from charging higher copayments and deductibles for mental health services. Insurers must pay for mental health treatment of the same scope and duration as other covered treatments; they can’t require people to get additional authorizations for mental health services; and they must offer an equally extensive selection of mental health providers and approved drugs.

The proportion of older Japanese-Americans is far larger than any other ethnic group in the United States, making them a good study cohort to determin how the rest of the country will handle aging in the future, according to UCLA researchers. A recently released study by the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research concluded that nearly a quarter of Japanese-Americans are over the age of 65, twice the populace at large. However, over the next 35 years, the proportion of the U.S. population over 65 will match the current numbers of Japanese-Americans – meaning the former group could provide a glimpse of what is in store for older Americans down the line.

UCSF Promotes Trauma-Based Primary Care Model

Researchers at the University of California at San Francisco have recommended in a new white paper that primary care providers take a patient’s childhood and adult traumas into account as part of their clinical approach.

The federal government is quietly warning states that failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act could imperil billions in federal subsidies for hospitals and doctors who care for the poor. In an April 14 letter to Florida Medicaid director Justin Senior, Vikki Wachino, acting director of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) wrote: “Uncompensated care pool funding should not pay for costs that would be covered in a Medicaid expansion.”

The skilled nursing facility at Seton Medical Center in Daly City has been fined $100,000 by the California Department of Public Health for a November 2014 incident that led to the suffocation of a patient. The patient, a female with a history of pneumonia and profound swallowing problems, had had a permanent tracheostomy not long after she was admitted in January 2014.

When Allison L. Diamant, M.D., an adjunct professor at the UCLA Geffen School of Medicine, began practicing medicine in the 1990s, there was still a lot of apprehension among lesbians, gays and transgender patients about disclosing their sexual or gender orientations to physicians. Some 20 years later, with same sex marriage legal in a majority of states and transgender characters in two popular television shows, a lot of attitudes have changed. But according to Diamant, members of the LGBT community still have issues accessing providers sensitive to their needs.

As prescription drug overdose deaths soar nationwide, most states have failed to take a simple step that would make it harder for doctors to prescribe the deadliest of all narcotics. Methadone overdoses kill about 5,000 people every year, six times as many as in the late 1990s, when it was prescribed almost exclusively for use in hospitals and addiction clinics where it is tightly controlled. It is four times as likely to cause an overdose death as oxycodone, and more than twice as likely as morphine. In addition, experts say it is the most addictive of all opiates.