Center in the News

“Denying a segment of our population access to vaccines because of paperwork” won’t end the pandemic any sooner, Ponce said.

Despite state policy that says immigration status does not affect vaccine eligibility, the county requires a photo ID and proof of age to receive a vaccine at its clinics, according to its policies published on the county’s website. Ninez Ponce, a professor at UCLA’s Fielding School of Public Health, said the county’s photo ID policy, and the chilling effect it could have on vaccination rates among undocumented. “Denying a segment of our population access to vaccines because of paperwork” won’t end the pandemic any sooner, Ponce said. People should be concerning for everyone in the community.

A just-published report by Nourish California and CIPC, which used statewide survey data collected from the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research from 2017 to 2020, found that 45% of undocumented immigrants in California are affected by food insecurity. Among children under 18, the rate is even higher, at 64% — meaning that nearly two out of every three undocumented children are food insecure.

This week, Newsom’s Healthy California for All Commission delivered its report, endorsing — in concept — “unified financing” that would pay for universal health care coverage, but stopping well short of a specific proposal.

The Biden administration has set its sights on fixing the "family glitch", a move that will have far reaching ramifications .. and result in the largest expansion of ACA coverage since the law was passed more than a decade ago. "This fix to the ACA to eliminate what's been known as the family glitch is a very big deal," Gerald Kominski, Ph.D., a senior fellow at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and professor of public health, told Health. "Last year, the Kaiser Family Foundation published a study estimating that 5.14 million people are currently affected by the family glitch...This

RIGHTS fact sheets on Public Charge and Workplace Exclusion

Last January, Newsom revealed another proposal, to include another 700,000 undocumented people, between the ages of 26 and 49, in Medi-Cal coverage, starting in 2024. The initiative must be approved in this year's final budget. Children and young adults are already eligible. Still, researchers from the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research noted that once Medi-Cal is expanded to migrants over 50, some 3.2 million people will remain uninsured in California, of whom 1.16 Millions will be undocumented, because they earn more than the marked annual income limit.

“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."