Posted on August 14th, 2007 — in Health Care
According to a recent study by the California HealthCare Foundation, there has been a signficant shift since the mid-1990s toward “hospitalists” rather than “primary care-directed hospital care.” A hospitalist is a primary care physician whose primary focus is hospital care for inpatients. After the inpatient is discharged, the hospitalist returns the responsibility for care for the patient to the patient’s primary care physician.
The report notes that “the hospitalist field has become the fastest growing specialty in the history of American medicine, skyrocketing from a few hundred physicians in the mid 1990s to more than 20,000 today.” At least 59% of California hospitals have hospitalists on their staffs. The conclusion of the report is that the rise of hospitalists could have a significant impact on the provision of health care in the state, with the potential of higher turnover and burnout rates among personnel who are spread too thin and issues around the current internal medicine training that is given to residents, which does not currently place enough emphasis on peri-operative and critical care, among other things.
Posted on August 14th, 2007 — in Polls and Surveys :: State Budget
A Field Poll released today indicates that the ongoing state budget crisis, which will soon drag into its seventh week, hasn’t yet registered with most California voters. Just 12% of registered voters are paying “a lot of attention” to the stalemate, with another 37% saying that they are giving some attention to the crisis. But 51% say that they are paying little or no attention to the turmoil.
Nonetheless, it could be that if the crisis drags on and begins to affect more state services and priorities, voters will start paying more attention. (When the Field Poll asked similar questions toward the end of the last budget crisis, in late August 2002, a total of 87% of registered voters viewed the crisis as either “very serious” or “somewhat serious.”) Even now, an overwhelming majority of registered voters think that the budget deadlock is either a “very serious” (43%) or “somewhat serious” (38%) problem.
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Posted on August 9th, 2007 — in Children and Families :: Health Care
A recent report from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research points out that even before taking health care costs into consideration, California is an expensive place to live. The average single adult needs to have just over $24,000 a year to pay just for housing and food. The average single-parent family with two children has to have $48,000. The average two-parent family with two children needs to have up to $56,300.
(Of course, housing costs vary throughout the state. The most expensive region for housing is the Bay Area, where an average two-bedroom apartment rented at $1312 per month in 2007, based on federal HUD estimates. The least expensive region was that covered by Butte, Colusa, Glenn, Shasta, Sutter, Tehama, and Yuba Counties, where the same average was $666 per month.)
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Posted on August 7th, 2007 — in Politics :: State Budget
The state budget stalemate is now six weeks old, with no sign of resolution in sight. Thus far, the crisis has meant $227 million in unpaid Medi-Cal bills and, later this week, it will mean $212.6 million in unpaid medical reimbursements for hospitals, clinics, and nursing homes, according to the Sacramento Bee.
The current budget deadlock is the worst since 2002, when it took almost 10 weeks for a budget to reach Governor Gray Davis for his signature.
The Assembly passed a $103 billion budget on July 20. The Senate has not voted for this budget. The holdouts are 14 Republican senators who refuse to pass the budget on several grounds.
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Posted on August 6th, 2007 — in Elections and Voting :: Politics
The Secretary of State has withdrawn approval of most major electronic voting systems in the state after reviewing the results of the “top-to-bottom” review of those systems. The Secretary of State had until Friday to certify or decertify the voting systems in time for the February primary.
The decision will effectively bar at least 21 of California’s 58 counties from using already-purchased voting systems manufactured by Diebold and Sequoia in the February primary. They will instead have to switch to an “optical scan” balloting method (which uses electronic equipment to read paper ballots). Orange County will be allowed to continue using equipment manufactured by Hart InterCivic if it meets certain security benchmarks. The other counties will have to ensure that their voting systems meet a list of security standards before they are permitted to use them in another election, including implementing a “100% manual count” of all votes cast on the equipment and allowing the use of only one affected voting machine per polling place.
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