Archived California Healthcare News

Los Angeles County: 9.0%
Orange County: 7.5%
Riverside County: 8.8%
San Bernardino County: 9.3%
San Diego County: 8.4%
Santa Clara County: 8.4%
 

Source: 2019 March of Dimes Report Card

One of California’s largest health insurance plans has distinguished itself, and not in a good way.

Covered California has named Jim Watkins as its new chief financial officer.

Watkins served as Covered California’s deputy director of financial planning and forecasting operations prior to the CFO appointment, and prior to that was a long-time executive at the Department of Health Care Services. He replaces Dora Mejia, who had served in the position since 2013. Watkins will be paid $180,000 per year.

Inappropriate vaccine exemption complaints in California*

2015: 1
2016: 12
2017: 44
2018: 36
2019: 99 (as of October 22, 2019)

* Number of complaints made to Medical Board of California
 

Source: California Department of Health via San Diego Union-Tribune

Early Medicaid expansion in California was associated with a reduction in the number of evictions, with 24.5 fewer evictions per month in each county from a pre-expansion average of 224.7. These results imply that for every thousand new Medicaid enrollees in California, Medicaid expansion was associated with roughly twenty-two fewer evictions per year. Additionally, there was a 2.9% reduction in evictions per capita associated with early expansion.

Diana Shalabi had to be sure. She was 15 when she told her dad she needed cash for a high school football game. Actually, it was for pregnancy tests. Test after test confirmed the news she wasn’t ready to face.

“I was like, ‘this is not happening,’ ” Shalabi said. “I was crying every day.”

That was four years ago, and she gave birth to a daughter, Amina. Her marriage to the baby’s father lasted less than a year. Today she says she has sole responsibility for Amina, and they live in Delano, a farming town of 52,000 north of Bakersfield in Kern County.

Oakland-based Kaiser Permanente reported strong earnings for the third quarter ending Sept. 30. Net income rose to $1.17 billion, compared to $884 million for the third quarter of 2018, an increase of 26.4%. Revenues also rose, to $20.9 billion from $19.9 billion in the year-ago quarter, up 5.3%. The operating margin dipped from 3.2% to 2.9% as operating expenses increased by more than $1 billion compared to the third quarter of 2018.

            Enrollment was up slightly, to 12.2 million as of Sept. 30, up 75,000 from a year ago.

Newly released data reveals that more than a quarter of California children in foster care don’t receive timely medical or dental exams, increasing their risk of having health problems that go unaddressed.