Health

In the final days of the session, hundreds of bills landed on Brown’s desk. Here are some of the most consequential.

A bill that would have allowed Californians to buy "pro-choice" license plates—designed as a small but symbolic rebuke to President Trump and congressional Republicans—has died in an Assembly fiscal committee.

California’s Obamacare exchange, Covered California, is struggling to respond to uncertainty over whether the Trump administration will continue to support the health care program.

Fear that the Trump administration would make good on his threats to stop payments to insurers for Obamacare has subsided, for now, after a spokesman said all August payments would be made.

When a therapy dog refused to drink at a San Diego grade school, it was the first clue that something was wrong with the water. Tests revealed why the pup turned up its nose—the presence of polyvinyl chloride, the polymer in PVC pipes that degrade over time. But further analysis found something else that had gone undetected by the dog, the teachers and students of the San Diego Cooperative Charter School, and the school district: elevated levels of lead. Nor is this an isolated situation. Tests have turned up harmful levels of lead in water fountains and taps at other schools in San Diego and Los Angeles.

It seems like a simple solution. Raise what you pay doctors for treating low-income patients, and they’ll treat more of them. All those waits for appointments and physician shortages that have long plagued the state’s low-income health insurance program—a program that one out of every three Californians now relies on—could be remedied with a simple dose of economics.  But in health care, nothing is that simple.

Today California lawmakers respond to Trump's threat to "let Obamacare fail" with a retort of their own: “We’ll see you in court.”

The underbelly of cap and trade: Letting industries buy carbon credits or offsets, rather than modernize old equipment, means pollution in many poor communities could get worse.

(Update: On Sept. 12, the Senate voted down AB 186. Its sponsor, Assemblywoman Susan Eggman, said “I am committed to finding a way forward next year.”) Many California communities could open centers inviting addicts to shoot up hard drugs under a little-noticed bill that has cleared the state Assembly and now awaits a vote on the Senate […]

It has become a familiar routine for the Sears family: Gather the medical experts, trek to Sacramento, and tell another panel of lawmakers how their 6-year-old son died from the anesthesia a dentist gave him to pull a tooth. Then watch as legislators water down the solution that pediatricians insist would prevent other California children […]