State officials had projected that 2 million Californians would join Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for low-income people, by July because of the economic devastation wrought by COVID-19. Yet enrollment has barely budged, and why is unclear.
Check out KHN’s video series — Behind The Byline: How the Story Got Made. Come along as journalists and producers offer an insider’s view of health care coverage that does not quit.
The pandemic has given the National Institutes of Health an opportunity to show the value of its $1.5 billion “All of Us” research program. A major effort to make the platform’s database representative of America resulted in minorities making up more than half of its more than 270,000 volunteers.
Although younger people are hospitalized and die less frequently than their elders when infected with COVID-19, their cases are harder to trace. As a result, the virus is spreading uncontrollably throughout much of Southern California. Even hospital staffs are affected by community spread.
Some districts want to bring everyone back to the classroom and some are planning distance-only learning, while most others are settling on one of a variety of options in the middle. Whatever their leanings, they all face vast, troubling uncertainty.
Even as most U.S. states and authorities reimpose many of the restrictions they had prematurely lifted, public health experts say you can still have a safe social life — just not the one you were used to before the pandemic hit.
Unlike earlier in the year, most hospitals are not proactively canceling elective surgeries, even in some places seeing spikes in coronavirus patients.
Executions have been on hold in California since 2006, stalled by a series of legal challenges. But COVID-19 is proving a lethal presence on San Quentin’s death row.
Health care workers on the front lines of the COVID crisis have spent exhausting months working and self-quarantining off-duty to keep from infecting others, including their families. Encountering people who indignantly refuse face coverings can feel like a slap in the face.
For three years, staffers at UCLA Health have been quietly fulfilling final wishes for dying patients in the intensive care unit. Amid the isolating forces of the pandemic, their work has become all the more meaningful.
