California Governor's sealCalifornia’s Governor has three options when the Legislature sends the Governor a bill: Sign it; veto it; or, allow the bill to become law without the Governor’s signature.
Nursing students at a university health care facility. (Photo: Africa Studio, via Shutterstock)OPINION: Nursing is in my blood. My parents are both nurses. My sister, countless cousins and others in my family have all dedicated themselves to serving others through the noble profession of nursing. When I graduated high school, I briefly tried to outrun my destiny. I left Los Angeles to enroll at UC Merced, only to find that the call to nursing remained strong.
An illustration of the modern workforce. (Photo: Shutterstock)When I was a member of the electrical engineering faculty at the University of Michigan in the early 1990’s, I will never forget what the head of our department would invariably say to me whenever I stayed in the lab to work late. “Why are you still here,” he wanted to know. “Don’t you have a family to go home to?” From equal pay for equal work to access to health care and a host of other issues, it should be obvious to any thinking person that we don’t have the level playing field valued by so many Americans.
A youngster on his visit to the dentist. (Photo: Wavebreakmedia, via Shutterstock)It is not often that dental professionals, health care providers, advocates, and legislators from both sides of the aisle all agree on an issue, but that is precisely what happened at a hearing this week on the state’s dental program for low-income children. Testimony and discussion honed in on the sobering results of a December 2014 state audit, which found that millions of children enrolled in Medi-Cal (California’s Medicaid program) were not getting the dental care they need.
The California agency that oversees the state’s low-income health plan vastly overstated the number of doctors who accepted patients through the state program last year, even as the number of people enrolled in the program was set to skyrocket under the federal Affordable Care Act, the California Health Report has found.