Center in the News

The California Department of Health Care Services on Tuesday launched two new health services offering free telehealth to families with children up to age 25. According to the California Health Interview Survey, one of the largest state health surveys in the country, about one-third of California teens experienced serious psychological distress between 2019 and 2021, with a 20% increase in adolescent suicides.

The new UCLA policy brief shows significant mental health disparities among immigrant groups in California. Recent immigrants residing in the U.S. for less than five years experienced a 140% increase in severe psychological distress, from 5% (2015–17) to 12% (2019–21).

In San Francisco, the share of people 65 and older who said they'd used cannabis within the last month increased from 10% in 2017 (a year after marijuana was legalized in California) to 13.7% in 2022, according to the latest data from the California Health Interview Survey.

Anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies are widely known to have harmful impacts on mental health, but a new policy brief from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research has revealed large disparities in rates of serious psychological distress across immigrant subgroups in California.

Wellvolution, a digital health platform by Blue Shield of California, will now be more inclusive and accessible for Spanish speakers ... Hispanic communities in California are more likely to have difficulty finding a primary care doctor or specialist than other groups, likely due to language barriers, according to data from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research as compiled by The California Health Care Almanac.

Among Latinos and Asians living in California, immigrants are less likely than citizens to own a firearm and more likely to report being afraid of becoming a victim of gun violence, according to a new study from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. "This study shows that the immigrant population's concern about gun violence is significant."

In medical research and public health in the United States, people with Asian ancestry are almost always grouped into a single racial category. They seem to be doing very well — better than white Americans in important categories.

But separate out subgroups of Asian Americans and outcomes are far poorer... In a 2020 study, Ninez Ponce, who directs UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research, found at least one disparity that was disguised by aggregation in every Asian subgroup she and her colleagues examined. “You cannot have health equity without data equity,” said Ponce. 

Researchers discovered that compared to caregivers in other surveys—such as the California Health Interview Survey and the Caregiving in the United States survey — the California Caregiver Resource Centers caregivers tended to be older (about 40% were over 65) and more diverse. Slightly fewer than half reported their race and ethnicity as other than white and non-Hispanic.

Race and ethnicity also correlate with food insecurity ... Non-citizen Asian residents at 12.5% also had greater food insecurity than whites, though U.S.-born and naturalized citizens of Asian descent did not. The situation for Black Californians was even more dire. According to numbers from UCLA’s 2022 California Health Interview Survey, 49.9% of low-income Black adults in California could not afford adequate food that year.