Medi-Cal

KFF Health News: Medi-Cal’s Fragmented System Can Make Moving A Nightmare
When Lloyd Tennison moved from Walnut Creek to Stockton last year, he assumed his coverage under Medi-Cal, California’s safety-net health insurance program, would be transferred seamlessly. About three weeks before his May move, Tennison called the agency that administers Medi-Cal in Contra Costa County, where Walnut Creek is located, to inform them he’d be moving to San Joaquin County. (Wolfson, 7/7)

Medi-Cal’s Fragmented System Can Make Moving a Nightmare

When Medi-Cal beneficiary Lloyd Tennison moved last year from Contra Costa County to San Joaquin County, he was bumped off his managed care plan without notice before his new coverage took effect. His case highlights a chronic issue in California’s fragmented Medicaid program. (Bernard J. Wolfson, 7/6 )

CalMatters: Medi-Cal Mental Health Reform Likely To Mean Service Cuts
Cynthia Garcia Williams was 30 years old and six months sober when the state let her bring her three kids home from foster care. She had been addicted to drugs on-and-off for 17 years and didn’t know how to begin caring for her children, Garcia Williams said. “The last I had the kids, I was totally in my addiction. When they came home I didn’t know what to do. I felt like these little kids were looking at me like ‘do something,’” Garcia Williams said. “I had lost all of my skills.” (Hwang, 7/6)

CDC and Gun Injuries

NPR: CDC Helping States Address Gun Injuries After Years Of Political Roadblocks
Each year, Utah sees its share of accidental injuries caused by firearms. When state health officials looked carefully at the hundreds of injuries that required emergency treatment in hospitals, they found most resulted from lapses in the most basic elements of gun safety. (Neuman, 7/7)

Incarcerated Parents

The Mercury News: New California Law Would Place Incarcerated Parents Closer To Their Children
The first prison Amika Mota entered was in Chino, an agonizingly long 10-hour drive from her children. During her two years in the California Institution for Women, Mota got to see 14-year-old Milo, 11-year-old Soleil and 6-year-old Blossom only once and mostly communicated through letters. Mota would write to her children once a week, but the letters couldn’t capture the joy of being in the same room. A case manager helped Mota get relocated to another women’s prison only two and a half hours away, and she was able to see her kids more frequently. (Stein, 6/5)

Hospitals

Stat: Why Hospitals Are Withdrawing From US News Rankings
Mercy Philadelphia Hospital was planning on shutting down. Losing Mercy, a safety-net hospital serving a predominantly low-income and Black community, would have created a health care desert in West Philadelphia. “It would have been easy for us to just absorb it into our existing hospital beds,” said Kevin Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System. “But we thought it was wrong that patients in a poor part of town would have to travel two bus routes, 20 city blocks.” (Bajaj, 7/6)

Children’s Health

Axios: Researchers At Nationwide Children's Hospital Achieve Medical Breakthrough
Breakthrough research at Nationwide Children's Hospital has produced a long-awaited treatment for a rare genetic disorder seen in young kids. The FDA recently approved Elevidys, the first gene therapy meant to treat Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) in 4- and 5-year-old patients. (Buchanan, 7/5)

Medical Schools and Affirmative Action

The New York Times: With End Of Affirmative Action, A Push For A New Tool: Adversity Scores
For the head of admissions at a medical school, Dr. Mark Henderson is pretty blunt when sizing up the profession. “Mostly rich kids get to go to medical school,” he said. In his role at the medical school at the University of California, Davis, Dr. Henderson has tried to change that, developing an unorthodox tool to evaluate applicants: the socioeconomic disadvantage scale, or S.E.D. (Saul, 7/2)

Stat: After Affirmative Action Ruling, Medical Educators Look To 'Holistic Review'
After having a day to read through the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, some medical school and educational leaders are more hopeful that a path exists for them to diversify future classes and the health care workforce as they scramble to understand its impact on the next admissions cycle and the class of 2024. Several told STAT they saw the court’s ruling as explicitly endorsing the use of “holistic review,” a tool used increasingly by medical, dental, and nursing schools and other institutions to build classes that better reflect the demographics of the nation. For years, medical schools have been seeking to train physicians who better resemble the patients they treat — a key part of the effort to reduce health disparities. (McFarling, 6/30)

Women’s Health

NPR: U.S. Maternal Deaths Keep Rising. Here's Who Is Most At Risk
The number of people dying in the U.S. from pregnancy-related causes has more than doubled in the last 20 years, according to a new study, published in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association. And while the study found mortality rates remain "unacceptably high among all racial and ethnic groups across the U.S.," the worst outcomes were among Black women, Native American and Alaska Native people. (Huang and Greenhalgh, 7/4)

AP: Maternal Deaths In The US More Than Doubled Over Two Decades. Black Mothers Died At The Highest Rate
Maternal deaths across the U.S. more than doubled over the course of two decades, and the tragedy unfolded unequally. Black mothers died at the nation’s highest rates, while the largest increases in deaths were found in American Indian and Native Alaskan mothers. And some states — and racial or ethnic groups within them – fared worse than others. (Ungar, 7/3)