Center in the News
“California is home to such a diverse group of Asian Americans, so with that, I think our results are very salient to other places where they’re not able to capture all the different Asian subpopulations,” Rita Shimkhada, PhD, a senior research scientist at UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and lead researcher, told SeniorsMatter. “It’s been one of the critical data sources for this body of literature out there on Asian American subgroups and Native Pacific Islander research.”
"This NHPI community is like the canary in the coal mine." "When the data first came out about COVID cases and deaths by race, ethnicity, I was, frankly, really shocked." "Other states didn't even have data on Native Hawaiian Pacific Islanders."
“We know it’s a common misconception that Asians are doing better than other racial groups,” Riti Shimkhada, the study’s lead researcher and a senior research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, told NBC Asian America. “There’s much that we don’t know about our older adults, and these results show they aren’t doing as well as people may perceive."
Even without the cuts to COVID spending by the government, it is important to determine what policy responses are needed federally and in California to address the health inequities Latinos and other people of color face, all of which were made worse by the pandemic. We need to prevent these injustices from reoccurring should there be a new COVID-19 surge, or in the inevitable case of a new pandemic.
Dr. Gerald Kominski, senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, is all about healthcare literacy, and he told Lifehacker why consumers need to know this stuff. Kominski not only studies the barriers to healthcare access in the country, but has experienced them firsthand. He explained that, like many people, he found one of his existing prescriptions wasn’t covered without a prior authorization when he switched to a new insurance provider. His new insurer required him to try other medications and demonstrate that they weren’t working before they would consider covering the one
As CalAIM launches, it is useful to take a closer look at the WPC pilot program and what has been learned to date from its implementation. This brief draws heavily on findings from the interim evaluation, which assessed WPC infrastructure development and implementation and analyzed whether WPC led to “better care and better health” within the first three years. In this brief, we explore key questions involving the WPC pilots, which may provide insights for other states pursuing or contemplating similar strategies for identifying and addressing the medical and non-medical or social needs of
"You're more likely to see in racial and ethnic minorities that the kind of insurers near the end of their life are going to be a function of the type of employment and resources they had earlier in their life,"" Mays said. Examples include past employment that paid hourly wages and didn't offer benefits, or not being able to buy long-term care insurance.
""At the end of their lives and when they are utilizing these care facilities, those earlier inequities get played out again later in what it is that they have access to,"" Mays explained.
One California institution, on the other hand, has been asking such questions in the California Health Interview Survey, an ongoing effort interviewing 20,000 Californians each year about several dozen topics from internet use and difficulty finding health insurance to mental health care and asthma. The CHIS is conducted by the Center for Health Policy Research at UCLA, in collaboration with the California Department of Public Health and the Department of Health Care Services. One such study titled ""Gaps in Health Care Access and Health Insurance Among LGBT Populations in California"" found
It is estimated that about 3.2 million Californians will be uninsured this year, according to the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and the UC Berkeley Labor Center.