Posts Tagged: program
News
FairWarning: When the Republican-controlled Congress approved a landmark program in 2003 to help seniors buy prescription drugs, it slapped on an unusual restriction: The federal government was barred from negotiating cheaper prices for those medicines. Instead, the job of holding down costs was outsourced to the insurance companies delivering the subsidized new coverage, known as Medicare Part D.
Opinion
Many seniors and people with disabilities who need services through Medi-Cal and Medicare struggle every day to navigate complex health and long-term care decisions. Dealing with a serious illness is difficult enough without having your doctors, specialists, long term care providers, and other health care providers disconnected with no overall attention to the holistic needs of the individual.
Opinion
OPINION: When the California Air Resources Board released the results of its May auction of carbon allowances, audible gasps from around the state could be heard from the space station. I kid – but only just a little. The auction results did in fact create a great shock: many had expected at least half a billion dollars to be collected at the quarterly auction, but the auction generated only about ten million dollars. But here’s the truth: The super-low May auction result should actually help the State’s legal defense of cap-and-trade.
Analysis
Medi-Cal is a deeply misunderstood program. It spends a lot of money, but it’s most certainly not out of control, and it is not a welfare program. The truth is that Medi-Cal is one of the state’s most cost-effective programs, serving more than one-third of Californians and half of all California children.
Analysis
ANALYSIS: What if, instead of building prisons in remote locations, we put them near cities, accessible to family members and to the resources — educational, vocational, therapeutic, recreational, cultural — that are scarce in most prison towns?
Opinion
OPINION: Just as the state’s Renewable Portfolio Standard requires electric utilities to phase in a specific amount of clean energy in our electricity mix, the LCFS mandates that the oil industry phase in cleaner fuels to tackle the state’s biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions: the fuel that runs our cars, trucks, and buses.
News
Calpensions: A board working on a proposal to enroll most small business employees in a state-run retirement savings plan, unless they opt out, was told last week that small technology-focused financial firms could do the job. The founders of three firms that offer 401(k)s and other retirement plans to small businesses did not object to competition from the state.
News
A state review of a dental program that serves low-income Californians shows that significantly fewer dentists are accepting those patients, despite a surge in demand. According to the California Department of Health Care Services report, released July 1, the number of dentists accepting Medi-Cal patients fell by 14.5 percent between 2008 and 2013. That’s a loss of 1,354 providers for the Denti-Cal program, which is the dental portion of Medi-Cal.
Opinion
What if I told you there was a straightforward way to raise kids’ grades, increase funding for schools and cut costly emergency room visits? You’d probably tell me to get my head checked by a doctor. And I’d tell you to see a dentist.
News
With one in six California drivers – about 4.2 million people — having suspended licenses because they can’t pay court fines, a lawmaker has proposed reducing the suspensions in non-violent cases and setting up an amnesty program to help motorists.