Center in the News
According to the California Health Interview Survey, from 2019 to 2021 about one-third of California youth ages 12-17 experienced serious psychological distress. Current law allows youth ages 12 and up to consent to outpatient mental health services without the consent of a parent or guardian, but that differs for youth who have Medi-Cal due to language in the Family Code.
Some 41% of Latino adults in California are unable to afford enough food, according to the UCLA California Health Interview Survey. Limited income creates limited food choices, leading to a reliance on cheap, processed, sugar-rich foods as well as a disconnect from traditional and healthier foodways.
Statewide, a survey conducted by AAPI Data and UCLA Center for Health Policy Research shows that about one-third of Asians who reported difficulty accessing health care and mental health services cited limited language skills for a reason. Among those who are Chinese, the figure doubles for both categories.
Even before the shootings, more than two-thirds of Asian Americans in the state said they were worried about gun violence, the highest level among all racial groups, according to the 2021 California Health Interview Survey. Only one-third of whites, by contrast, responded similarly. Nearly half of Black and Asian American teens expressed concern about being victims of gun violence. Asian Americans have also expressed strong support for stricter gun laws.
In a precursor to the state’s current initiative, California experimented with a mix of housing assistance programs and social services through its “Whole Person Care” pilot program. Nadereh Pourat, of the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, evaluated the program for the state concluding that local trials reduced emergency visits and hospitalizations, saving an average of $383 per Medi-Cal beneficiary per year — a meager amount compared with the program’s cost. Over five years, the state spent $3.6 billion serving about 250,000 patients enrolled in local experiments, Pourat said.
"In general, the cost of keeping someone at home, with a program like IHSS, is far less than if they were to end up in institutional care," said Kathryn G. Kietzman, director of the Health Equity Program at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research.
Miranda Dietz, a research and policy associate at UC Berkeley Labor Center, said the significant increase in the number of Californians with health insurance over the last two years would be in jeopardy without the federal subsidies. Dietz co-wrote a study in partnership with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research that projects that as many as 1 million people will forgo insurance in California next year if federal subsidies expire.
The ACA “did close a lot of gaps” says Gerald Kominski, PhD, senior fellow at UCLA CHPR and research professor at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health and Luskin School of Public Affairs. “But we still have upward of roughly 25 million Americans without health insurance, and no other industrial, high-income nation can say that such a large portion of the population remains outside’’ the system.
Two Medi-Cal long-term care programs designed to keep seniors and disabled adults out of nursing homes are serving only a fraction of the eligible population, a UCLA Center for Health Policy
The first step is the definition. The next step is utilization," said D. Imelda Padilla-Frausto, PhD, MPH, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research, who helped craft the definition. "Research and evidence-based practices, or EBP, are primarily developed for English-speaking children and don't capture children speaking other languages and other cultures," explains Padilla-Frausto. "If that's how EBP are decided, are we capturing the needs of other groups?