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Last summer while Lydia Carranza was working at Simi Valley dental office, she was shot in the chest by a co-worker’s husband. A Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon, Ashkan Ghavami, believes her size-D breast implant might have saved her life. “She’s just one lucky woman…I saw the CT scan…The bullet fragments were millimeters from her heart and her vital organs. Had she not had the implant, she might not be alive today,” said Ghavami.
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Anthem Blue Cross’ parent called off a meeting with investors that was scheduled for next week to “review its 2010 financial outlook so that executives can prepare for a congressional hearing into its large rate hikes for individual policyholders in California,” states Duke Helfand from the Los Angeles Times. WellPoint Inc. Chief Executive Angela F. Braly has been called to testify next week about the future rate hikes of as much as 39%.
WellPoint has postponed the planned premium increases until May 1, “amid criticisms from consumers, state officials, members of Congress and the Obama administration,” reports Helfand. WellPoint blames the drastic increases on the rising medical costs, and said less than a quarter of individual policyholders would actually suffer from rate increases of 35% to 39%.
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According to a California analysis, 40-year-old mothers-to-be have a 50% higher chance than younger moms to bear a child affected by autism. Which continues to say that it is not likely that this delay in motherhood plays a big role in the current autism epidemic. Mothers over 40 years old in California increased by 300% while autism grew by 600% which at first look seems that the rise in autism parallels older mothers. Older moms don’t add up as the reason for this increase in autistic children, which is now one out of 100 kids.
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Anthem Blue Cross, California’s largest for-profit insurer, was asked by California insurance regulators to postpone problematic rate increases for individual policies. These rate increases, some as much as 39%, have “triggered widespread criticism from subscribers and brokers — and now from the federal government,” reports Duke Helfand from the Los Angeles Times. The Obama administration requested that Anthem justify these rate increases, and according to Helfand, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “voiced serious concern [in a letter to Anthem's president] over the higher premiums, which go into effect March 1 for many of the insurer’s estimated 800,000 individual policyholders.”
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Experts say California might have to go solo on extending healthcare coverage to the millions of uninsured Californians because “the future of federal overhaul efforts appears uncertain,” reports California Healthline. Nearly 7 million people are uninsured in California, and about the same amount of people are enrolled in the state’s Medicaid program, Medi-Cal. “Although federal health care reform could extend coverage to more Californians, it also could burden the cash-strapped state with additional Medi-Cal costs,” states California Healthline.
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Millions of Americans are uninsured; however the state of California has the largest number of people without insurance, and this number continues to grow. 6.6 million Californians are uninsured, and California has “a lower percentage of individuals with employer-sponsored coverage,” reports Paul Fronstin from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. Employer-sponsored coverage decreased 9% between 1987 and 2008, and “although Medicaid and individually purchased coverage partially offset this decline, more than 20% of Californians remain uninsured,” states Fronstin.
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Appropriate health care involves being able to see a doctor conveniently and frequently, and having doctors being able to attend to health issues before they get worse. However, Medi-Cal patients in California don’t get to visit primary care physicians easily and regularly, and are more likely to visit overcrowded emergency rooms and end up getting sicker. Expanding Medi-Cal is like “building a house on a sloping, cracked foundation,” states Anmol Singh Mahal from the San Francisco Chronicle.
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About a week ago, Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, expressed his dislike towards the health care bill because of how much the reform will cost the state of California. The National Center for Policy Analysis states that “he’s not alone,” and that many other states are not too fond of the health care bill either.
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Researchers hoped to find certain locations that had a lot of autism cases to examine the area for possible environmental clues linked to why autism rates are growing. In California there were 10 spots that had double the rates of autism, and these locations mainly consisted of white, highly educated parents. Even though researchers were hoping to find environmental clues to explain the increasing rates, “the findings likely say more about the U.S. healthcare system than the causes of autism,” states ABC News. This link to the healthcare system is due to the fact that there are so many people that are uninsured and unable to get their child professionally examined.
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California was suffering from a severe shortage of H1N1 vaccines; however, now it appears that the shortage is calming causing some counties to offer vaccinations to the public. Counties such as Ventura and Sacramento now have no limitations on who can get the immunization.
Yet, other counties such as Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino are still reserving their vaccines for children, young adults, pregnant women and the chronically ill. Despite some counties reserving their vaccines for certain priority groups, officials state that the vaccine shortage is under control.
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Non-profit company RAND decided to “secret shop” 353 California hospitals to see if they were following the law regarding hospitals and price transparency. This California state law (AB 1045) was enacted in 2006.
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