Since being diagnosed with HIV in 2022, Fernando Hermida has had to move three times to access treatment. A KFF Health News-Associated Press analysis found gay and bisexual Latino men account for a fast-growing proportion of new diagnoses and infections, showing they are falling behind in the fight against HIV. (Vanessa G. Sánchez and Devna Bose, Associated Press and Phillip Reese, )
News Of The Day
Health Care Workers Likely Won't Get Raises This Summer: Democrats in the California Legislature have agreed to delay a minimum wage increase for about 426,000 health care workers to help balance the state's budget. If approved by the Legislature, they could get the raise Oct. 15. Read more from AP.
Below, check out the roundup of California Healthline's coverage. For today's national health news, read KFF Health News' Morning Briefing.
More News From Across The State
Health Care Industry
San Diego Union-Tribune: Scripps To Close Maternity Unit At Its Chula Vista Hospital Sunday Scripps Health will move forward Sunday with its plans to end scheduled deliveries at its hospital in Chula Vista, a move that some in the community have said could be problematic for mothers with fewer resources and for those who experience medical emergencies while pregnant. (Sisson, 6/22)
Modesto Bee: Turf War Rages In Modesto Between Anesthesiologists and CRNAs Modesto has become a battleground for the biggest turf war between anesthesiologists and certified registered nurse anesthetists since California, in a hotly contested decision in 2009, opted out of the federal Medicare rules for administering anesthesia. The California Department of Public Health surveys at Stanislaus Surgical Hospital and Doctors Medical Center have caught the attention of physician anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetists across the country. (Carlson, 6/24)
Modern Healthcare: Blue Shield Of CA Fires Tosha Lara-Larios Over Alleged Fake DO Blue Shield of California has fired a senior executive it alleges misrepresented her name and professional credentials, the insurer said Friday. The nonprofit company "involuntarily terminated" Dr. Tosha Lara-Larios and reported her to law enforcement for fraud, a Blue Shield spokesperson wrote in an email. The San Diego Union-Tribune first reported her termination. (Tepper, 6/21)
Stat: How Kaiser Permanente Hospitals Track Risky Medical Devices When a new medical device hits the market, there's typically still some uncertainty about whether it works. Device makers generally do not have to submit as much, or as rigorous, clinical data to the Food and Drug Administration as their biotech counterparts. Once FDA regulators decide a device is safe and effective, companies and researchers then attempt to track how the device performs in the real world. (Lawrence, 6/24)
The Wall Street Journal: When Hospital Prices Go Up, Local Economies Take A Hit Rising healthcare prices have long eroded American wages. They are doing that by eating into jobs. Companies shed workers in the year after local hospitals raise their prices, new research found. Higher hospital prices pushed up premiums for employees' health insurance, which businesses help pay for. The new study, scheduled to be published Monday as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, is a comprehensive look at one way companies manage those higher premiums: cutting payrolls. (Evans, Mollica and Ulick, 6/23)
San Francisco Chronicle: UCSF Upgrades Midwifery To Doctoral Program Just As More Nurses Needed UCSF is ending its long-standing and esteemed master's program for nurse midwives in favor of a doctorate program that many alumni and others in the field say will take longer and cost more to complete — making it harder for people to become midwives at a time maternal health workers are needed more than ever. (Ho, 6/23)
Affordable Care Act
NBC News: Appeals Court Finds 'Obamacare' Pillar Unconstitutional In Suit Over HIV-Prevention Drug A federal appeals court on Friday found unconstitutional a key component of the Affordable Care Act that grants a health task force the effective authority to require that insurers both cover an array of preventive health interventions and screenings and refrain from imposing out-of-pocket costs for them. The lawsuit centered on the objections of a coalition of small businesses in Texas to the requirement that they cover a drug for HIV prevention, known as PrEP, in their employee health plans. (Ryan, 6/23)
Axios: Court Upholds ACA's Free Preventive Services Mandate Health insurers nationwide must continue to provide coverage of certain preventive services like cancer screenings and behavioral counseling at no cost, a federal appeals court ruled Friday. The decision in the closely watched case largely preserves the Affordable Care Act's free preventive services requirement. (Goldman, 6/21)
HIV/AIDS
CNBC: Gilead's Twice-Yearly Shot To Prevent HIV Succeeds In Late-Stage Trial Gilead's experimental twice-yearly medicine to prevent HIV was 100% effective in a late-stage trial, the company said Thursday. None of the roughly 2,000 women in the trial who received the lenacapavir shot had contracted HIV by an interim analysis, prompting the independent data monitoring committee to recommend Gilead unblind the Phase 3 trial and offer the treatment to everyone in the study. Other participants had received standard daily pills. (Peebles, 6/20)
Government Policy
Los Angeles Times: Will New Supreme Court Weapons Decision Affect California Bans? A long-awaited U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a federal law barring domestic abusers from possessing firearms will have a narrower impact than some had hoped, but it will nonetheless play an important role in reshaping gun laws in California and across the country, legal experts said. Among the laws Friday's decision could affect are California's bans on assault-style weapons and large-capacity ammunition magazines, both of which are facing legal challenges in the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. (Rector, 6/23)
AP: California Gov. Gavin Newsom To Deliver State Of The State Address On Tuesday California residents will be able to watch Gov. Gavin Newsom's State of the State address online this week, his office said Sunday. After sending the text of the address to the state Legislature Tuesday morning, Newsom will record the speech on video. (6/23)
Abortion
Politico: In California, Is 'Pro-Choice Republican' A Winning Strategy? A Republican running to flip a competitive California House seat has an unusual strategy on abortion: Talk like a Clinton-era Democrat. "I'm a pro-choice Republican that believes abortion should be safe, legal and rare," said Matt Gunderson, the car dealership owner challenging Democratic Rep. Mike Levin in Southern California. That position, a throwback to Democrats' framing on abortion in the nineties, puts Gunderson in a vanishingly small club of Republicans who espouse support for abortion rights — and sets him apart from most GOP candidates who try to avoid the topic altogether. (Mason, 6/22)
ABC News: 2 Years After Roe V. Wade, Physicians Still Struggle To Provide Essential Care Obstetrics and gynecological care in much of the U.S. has transformed in the two years since Roe v. Wade was overturned, leaving physicians facing tough decisions as they try to provide patients with quality care and struggle to interpret unclear, confusing and strict state abortion laws. Physicians interviewed by ABC News across several states said they are relying on each other to determine what emergency and lifesaving care they can legally provide patients. (El-Bawab, 6/24)
Vox: Abortion In America After The End Of Roe, In 8 Charts Dobbs has had a devastating effect on pregnant people in huge swaths of the country. While the number of abortions across the country actually increased last year — thanks in large part to increasingly cheap and accessible medication abortion — that has not changed the fundamental realities of post-Dobbs America. Large reproductive care deserts have emerged in which there are no abortion providers for hundreds of miles. Pregnant people are being denied necessary medical care as their doctors fear the legal repercussions of providing it. All of this has exacerbated long-standing inequities. (Narea, 6/24)
Politico: Inside The $100-Million Plan To Restore Abortion Rights In America A new coalition of abortion-rights groups is marking the second anniversary of the fall of Roe v. Wade with a pledge to spend $100 million to restore federal protections for the procedure and make it more accessible than ever before. In plans shared first with POLITICO, groups including Planned Parenthood, the ACLU and Reproductive Freedom for All are banding together to form Abortion Access Now — a national, 10-year campaign that will both prepare policies for the next time Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, and build support for those policies among lawmakers and the public. At a private event Monday evening in Washington, they will pitch a group of influential progressives on going on offense at a time when abortion is outlawed in a third of the country. (Ollstein, 6/24)
The New York Times: Abortion Debate Shifts To Pregnancy And Fertility As Election Nears Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court's ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion. "Now it's about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant," she said. "It's profoundly personal to a majority of the public." (Zernike, 6/24)
The Hill: Vice President Harris: Anti-Abortion Laws Pose Health Care 'Crisis' Vice President Harris on Sunday argued the implications of anti-abortion laws go beyond the medical procedure and present a larger "crisis" for other women's health treatments. Harris, speaking with MSNBC on Sunday, and two years since the Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade, warned "everything is at stake" in the upcoming election regarding abortion and other reproductive freedoms. (Nazzaro, 6/23)
The New York Times: In Abortion Cases, Legions Of 'Friends' Seek To Persuade Supreme Court When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, establishing a constitutional right to abortion, it noted that it had received 14 friend-of-the-court briefs and listed them in a snug footnote at the beginning of the decision. ... In the decision that overturned Roe in 2022, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the court was flooded with more than 140 amicus briefs. The footnote had metastasized, spanning seven pages. Those 50 years of amicus briefs tell a cumulative story. (Liptak, 6/24)
CalMatters: CA Woman Alleges CVS Denied Her Abortion Pill After Miscarriage After months of trying, Angela Costales eagerly watched her at-home pregnancy test turn positive. She and her husband were so excited that they filmed a video at 3 a.m. to document the moment — but the joy they felt didn't last. Costales' first ultrasound showed placental abnormalities and no fetal heartbeat. She had lost the pregnancy and her first chance at becoming a mom. (Hwang, 6/24)
Housing Crisis
Sacramento Bee: $1 Billion In Grants To Fight Homelessness Across California Included In Budget Deal Funding for municipalities to combat homelessness will continue in the budget agreement between California Gov. Gavin Newsom and legislators, money that cities and counties had hoped would be part of a final deal — and that had been a sticking point between the governor and lawmakers as they worked to address California's estimated $45 billion budget deficit. (Jolly, 6/22)
Los Angeles Times: Closing The Funding Lag That Drains Millions From Homeless Services It was June 7, payday at Reclaim-Possibility, a 22-bed home in South Los Angeles for men released from jail and prison who might otherwise fall into homelessness. Once again, owner Kalain Hadley had to tell his 10 employees they might not be paid. Reimbursement checks due on the first from his funding agency, Amity Foundation, had not arrived. "It's just really not a pleasant conversation," he said. (Smith, 6/24)
Sacramento Bee: How One Woman Slid Into Homelessness And Found A Way Out In times of crisis, Shakela Wade's godmother, Virginia Avila, had always swooped in and provided the stability and words of wisdom she needed to tackle life's latest challenges. So, in late 2022 when Wade learned that Avila was becoming forgetful and suffering falls, she quit her job doing shelter intake in San Francisco and returned to her native Sacramento to assist her. (Anderson, 6/24)
Covid
Los Angeles Times: Summer COVID Bump Intensifies In L.A. And California The new COVID-19 subvariants collectively nicknamed FLiRT are continuing to increase their dominance nationwide, fueling a rise in cases in Los Angeles County and growth in the coronavirus levels seen in California wastewater. Taken together, the data point to a coronavirus resurgence in the Golden State — one that, while not wholly unexpected given the trends seen in previous pandemic-era summers, has arrived earlier and is being driven by even more transmissible strains than those previously seen. (Lin II, 6/24)
CIDRAP: Cannabis Use Linked To Worse COVID-19 Outcomes Cannabis use is linked to an increased risk of more serious COVID-19 outcomes, including hospitalization and intensive care unit (ICU) admission—similar to risks from tobacco use—according to a study today in JAMA Network Open from researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. (Soucheray, 6/21)
Stat: Bird Flu Snapshot: USDA Secretary Urges Farmers To Take Protective Measures As the H5N1 outbreak in dairy herds approaches the three-month mark, America's top animal health official is calling on farmers to step up the use of personal protective equipment, limit traffic onto their farms, and increase cleaning and disinfection practices in their barns and milking parlors. (Molteni, 6/24)
Around California
Los Angeles Times: Pomona Is Latest California City To Try A Guaranteed Income Program The city of Pomona is the latest California locality to offer unconditional cash to some residents in hopes of providing much-needed budgetary breathing room to residents still recovering financially from the COVID-19 pandemic. The Pomona Household Universal Grants Pilot Program, or Pomona HUG, will provide 250 people with $500 each month for 18 months. The money comes with no strings attached, and is intended to support families with young children in the eastern Los Angeles County city who are struggling to afford rent, child care and other expenses. (Plevin, 6/22)
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