Center in the News

“This is a great achievement and it is absolutely amazing, but there will still be some who will remain uninsured,” said Arturo Vargas Bustamante, health policy professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health. “It’s not universal health care, but the situation for many immigrants in California will be much better.”

In 2023, after Medi-Cal expands to cover undocumented immigrants 50 and older, about 3.2 million people will remain uninsured in California, according to researchers at the UC Berkeley Labor Center and the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. Of those, 1.16 million will

These barriers include a lack of timely access to needed care, not having a usual source of care, having trouble finding providers and experiencing unfair treatment, according to researchers from UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research and Williams Institute who conducted the study.

Using data from the health policy center’s California Health Interview Survey from 2015 to 2020, the researchers tracked health care access and insurance coverage by sexual orientation and gender identity. They found that bisexual men and women were the most likely of all groups to report not having a usual

“We still have growing death rates and case rates. How can we move forward in the pandemic when we’re still suffering?” said Karla Thomas, policy director for the UCLA Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander COVID-19 Data Policy Lab.

Throughout the pandemic, Pacific Islanders have been hit the hardest by COVID-19. Their mortality rate is nearly twice that of the statewide rate and nearly six times higher than the lowest rate of 2.5 deaths per 100,000 people among those who identify as multi-racial.

The concept of insurance is that everybody pays a little bit towards something, and it’s not a huge burden on a single group,” said Nadereh Pourat, director of the Health Economics and Evaluation Research Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. “If everybody has better quality of care, the expectation is that the costs are going to be lower.

On this episode of Managed Care Cast, we speak with Nadereh Pourat, PhD, MSPH, associate center director and the director of the health economics and evaluation research program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, and Alex Sripipatana, PhD, MPH, director of the division of data and evaluation at HRSA. Pourat, Sripipatant and colleagues recently published the HRSA-funded study “Intersection of Complexity and High Utilization among health center patients aged 18 to 64” in The American Journal of Managed Care®.

Indeed, according to a UCLA Center for Health Policy Research study, Medi-Cal enrollees already have much more difficulty finding physicians, including specialists, who accept their insurance. And we all know that patients who don’t seek the care they care get sicker – impacting their quality of life, threatening their lives, and exponentially increasing the cost of their treatment when they finally do seek care.

Mental health among young people is such a complex challenge, (and) the numbers of people struggling were already high before the pandemic,” Eisenberg said. “They’re even higher now and they will remain high.

The first California Health Interview Survey data about caregivers available in more than a decade indicates that a sizable proportion of family and friend caregivers in California are struggling financially, experiencing physical or mental health problems, and receiving little if any financial support for their caregiving responsibilities.

If we can identify all the impediments to good care, can’t we find the will to remove them and build a better system?

“I think we can,” said UCLA health policy research scientist Imelda Padilla-Frausto, a member of the L.A. County Mental Health Commission, who is big on homelessness prevention and early mental health intervention.
The county is housing thousands of people each year but the lifeboat is still taking on water. Padilla-Frausto calls for a greater “upstream approach” that targets social and economic needs early on, so that “we are not left bailing out a sinking boat.” She said

Eliminating the premiums is likely to create more stable coverage for families over time, regardless of whether their income inches up or down, said Nadereh Pourat, associate director of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.

“It’s a good idea for those children not to cycle in and out, and the parents don’t have to worry about losing coverage if they can’t afford it in a given month,” she said.