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NUHW members Jessica Rentz and Adriana Webb were featured in an episode of the podcast Working People that delves into the ongoing strike by Kaiser behavioral health employees in Southern California.
An investigation by the San Francisco Chronicle found that deaths and violence plague the Santa Rosa Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, where for nearly a decade workers and patients have pleaded for the California Department of Public Health to better protect the thousands of people treated inside the facility each year. The agency, which licenses hospitals and responds to patient and worker complaints, has documented dozens of violations at Santa Rosa Behavioral since it opened, but has failed to hold the owner of the hospital, Signature, accountable. Signature also owns Sacramento Behavioral Healthcare Hospital, which NUHW organized last year. The story is part of an investigative series by the Chronicle.
With inmate suicide rates at an all-time high, a federal judge is putting control of California’s troubled inmate mental health programs into the hands of an outsider: President Biden’s former chief of prisons, Colette Peters. The Los Angeles Times reported that Peters will develop an oversight plan for psychiatric services for California’s prison population, where more than 34,000 inmates — more than a third of the California prison population — are considered to have some sort of serious mental disorder. According to court findings, not once in 35 years of litigation has California had enough mental health staff to provide an acceptable minimum level of care.
CalMatters reported that a spate of recent policy decisions by the Trump administration targeting transgender youth has led to an escalating mental health crisis among an already vulnerable population. Even in California, where top state leaders have championed policies to protect transgender people, nonprofit leaders and case workers say they are seeing sharp increases in depression, anxiety, self-harm and suicidal thoughts among the young people they serve. The Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to suicide prevention among this population, documented a nearly 700% increase in contacts to its mental health crisis hotline the day after the election.
Progressive California lawmakers have proposed a number of bills aimed at bolstering privacy protections for women, transgender people, and immigrants in response to intrusions by anti-abortion groups and federal law enforcement agencies. Among the measures listed by California Healthline are AB 45 by Assembly member Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, would make geofencing, the collection of phone location by data brokers, illegal around health care facilities that provide in-person services. It would also prevent reproductive health information collected during research from being disclosed in response to out-of-state requests. Sen. Scott Wiener’s SB 497 would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to access state databases on gender-affirming care and make it a misdemeanor to release the data to unauthorized parties. Sen. Jesse Arreguín’s SB 81 would require all health care facilities, including hospitals and community-based clinics, to follow state guidance to limit cooperation with immigration authorities. It would also prohibit providers from granting access to private areas or places where a patient is actively receiving treatment or care, unless there’s a warrant. Another immigration bill, AB 421, would limit the sharing of local law enforcement information if agents plan to make an arrest within a one-mile radius of a hospital or medical office, a child care or day care facility, a religious institution, or a place of worship.
Average monthly premiums for families with employer-provided health coverage in California’s private sector nearly doubled over the last 15 years, from just over $1,000 in 2008 to almost $2,000 in 2023, a KFF Health News analysis of federal data shows. That’s more than twice the rate of inflation. Also, employees have had to absorb a growing share of the cost. Small-business groups warn that, for workers whose employers don’t provide coverage, the problem could get worse if Congress does not extend enhanced federal subsidies that make health insurance more affordable on individual markets such as Covered California, the public marketplace that insures more than 1.9 million Californians. FierceHealth reported that Sutter Health agreed to settle a long-running and recently revived antitrust class-action lawsuit where plaintiffs claimed about $411 million in damages from 2011 to 2020 as the healthcare giant used its power in an uncompetitive healthcare market to force health plans into contracts that only included inpatient services at Sutter-affiliated hospitals. A jury had unanimously ruled in favor of Sutter Health in March 2022; however, following multiple appeals the case was revived last and remanded for a new trial that was set to begin this week
