December 31, 2020

1. California widens mental health conditions insurers must cover In the past, state law only required treatment for nine serious mental illnesses. Even before the pandemic, more than half of Californians said most people with mental health conditions couldn’t get the help they needed. Some families even dropped private insurance to qualify for treatment in […]

In 2019 Governor Gavin Newsom more than doubled how much money the state spends on its tax credit for low income workers. But since its establishment in 2015, the credit has been unavailable for undocumented workers who pay taxes, until now. Depending on a household’s size and income, the California Earned Income Tax credit can […]

Millions of Californians continue to risk COVID-19 infection by showing up in person at work during the pandemic. But the state and federal governments have never required companies to share information about outbreaks with their employees — or to health authorities. More than nine months after Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the first shelter-in-place order, a […]

For decades, many California teens convicted of serious crimes — such as robbery, assault, and murder — were sent to state juvenile prisons. This year Gov. Gavin Newsom announced the closure of these state facilities. Under a new law, California’s three remaining youth prisons will no longer accept newly convicted youth after July 2021. Instead, counties will […]

Coronavirus, of course, detonated our every expectation of 2020. For the most fortunate, this created room for new pastimes, new priorities. For the least so, it hollowed out holes that can never be filled. Nor was COVID our only profound challenge. There were raging wildfires, again. There was an overdue reckoning with racism, again. There […]