ADP Daily News Clips

Feds Crack Down On Hundreds Of Medical Marijuana Shops In California

2013-06-12T10:17:00.001-07:00

Associated Press

Federal prosecutors have sent dozens of letters warning medical marijuana shops in Los Angeles and Long Beach to shut down or risk potential criminal or civil action. Authorities say more than 100 pot clinics across Los Angeles County received the letters Tuesday. Lawsuits also were filed against two property owners in Long Beach, telling them it's illegal to allow pot sales in buildings they own.

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AM Alert: California SEIU lobbies lawmakers on health care

2013-06-12T10:17:00.000-07:00

Sacramento Bee

The Service Employees International Union California, fresh off a major local securing a tentative contract agreement that includes a raise, is marshaling its members this morning to lobby lawmakers. Sen. Ed Hernandez, D-West Covina, and Assemblyman Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, are scheduled to address attendees, who will be pressing health-related initiatives such as a Medi-Cal expansion as well as legislation to prohibit large employers from paying employees a wage low enough that they would qualify for Medi-Cal. The rally starts at 10 a.m. on the Capitol's south steps.

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State employees to receive raises in proposed deal

2013-06-12T10:16:00.000-07:00

Associated Press

About 95,000 state employees could be in line for a 4.5 percent pay raise as part of a tentative three-year agreement reached Tuesday between Gov. Jerry Brown and California's largest public employee union.In an email to members, Service Employees Union International Local 1000 President Yvonne Walker said the pay hike would be received by July 1, 2015, with specific timing dependent on state revenues.

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Chantix effective in curbing alcohol abuse

2013-06-12T10:15:00.000-07:00

Examiner.com

Recent research is supporting the efficacy of using Chantix (varenicline)gum to reduce cravings for alcohol abuse. Yesterday’s Boston Globe reported that the popular stop-smoking drug reduced cravings and alcohol use in 200 people in a controlled study. Another recent study of 64 participants, classified as “heavy drinkers” at the Wheeler Center for the Neurobiology of Addiction at the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, saw the group reduce their average number of drinks per week by 35.32% through the use of Chantix.

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CA Doctor Indicted For Illegally Dispensing Oxycodone

2013-06-11T10:15:00.000-07:00

Workerscompensation.com

Fresno, CA (WorkersCompensation.com) - On Thursday, a federal grand jury returned a 27-count indictment against Terrill Eugene Brown, 61, of Visalia, charging him with conspiracy to dispense oxycodone, dispensing of oxycodone and hydrocodone, and structuring currency transactions to avoid bank reporting requirements, United States Attorney Benjamin B. Wagner and Fresno County District Attorney Elizabeth Egan announced.

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Former California politician facing new charge

2013-06-11T10:14:00.001-07:00

Associated Press

A longtime California politician convicted of using campaign donations and taxpayer funds to fuel what he described as a gambling addiction has been charged in a separate case involving an illegal campaign flier, prosecutors said Wednesday. Former Santa Clara County Supervisor George Shirakawa was charged with false impersonation after authorities said his DNA matched DNA found on a stamp used on the flier sent during a city council race in 2010.

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Divvying up California healthcare funds

2013-06-11T10:14:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

The 2010 federal healthcare law will make health coverage available to millions of the uninsured, but it won't reach all of them. In California, county health officials and the Brown administration are now tussling over how much to spend on the remaining uninsured, and on county health programs in general. Gov. Jerry Brown wants to reclaim some of the state tax dollars that counties have been spending because there will be fewer uninsured to care for, and that's not unreasonable. But the state should be careful not to undermine the counties' efforts to protect public health, nor should it deny them the ability to care for more people in a more cost-effective way, if they choose.

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California budget talks set to finish this week amid much better tone than usual

2013-06-11T10:13:00.001-07:00

San Jose Mercury News

With California lawmakers facing a midnight Saturday deadline to pass a spending plan, the annual number-crunching debate no longer centers on whether the state's books are balanced but how much of a possible surplus should be spent. Instead of fighting tooth and nail to prevent cuts to their favorite programs, leaders at the state Capitol will spend the rest of the week deciding how to divvy up extra revenues to schools, social services and public safety programs.

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Treatments of physical and mental health are coming together

2013-06-11T10:13:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

Many days, the sheer weight of Iszurette Hunter's clinical depression becomes more than she can lift. She clings to her bed in her South Los Angeles home. Important obligations slide away, including keeping appointments with doctors who are trying to control her asthma and high blood pressure. "I don't have no desire," she explains. As the nation seeks to extend healthcare coverage to millions of new and in many cases chronically ill patients, one of the great parallel challenges to controlling costs and improving delivery of care will be managing the mental health problems of people like Hunter.

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Embattled board mulls prescription abuse solutions

2013-06-05T10:12:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

Under pressure from state lawmakers to reform, the Medical Board of California on Tuesday embarked on a search for a new executive director and considered a host of proposals aimed at combating reckless prescribing by doctors that is contributing to overdose deaths.

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Sebelius Asked Companies to Support Health Care Law

2013-06-05T10:11:00.001-07:00

New York Times

Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of health and human services, disclosed on Tuesday that she had made telephone calls to three companies regulated by her department and urged them to help a nonprofit group promote President Obama’s health care law. She identified the companies as Johnson & Johnson, the drug maker; Ascension Health, a large Roman Catholic health care system; and Kaiser Permanente, the health insurance plan.

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Dan Walters: California budget has many holes to fill in 10 days

2013-06-05T10:11:00.000-07:00

Sacramento Bee

Anyone who would tune into the Legislature's budget conference committee sessions this week expecting to learn how the 2013-14 budget is shaping up would be disappointed. The committee is going through the budget item by item, at least those items where the Assembly's Democrats and the Senate's Democrats differ, but anything more than slightly controversial is being "left open."

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Study Finds too Many Americans Drink too Much

2013-06-05T10:10:00.000-07:00

San Diego Union-Tribune

On any given day in the United States, 18 percent of men and 11 percent of women drink more alcohol than federal guidelines recommend, according to a study that also found that 8 percent of men and 3 percent of women are full-fledged “heavy drinkers.” That means the great majority of Americans stay within the advised limit of two drinks a day for men and one for women, according to the study that appeared in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

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California: Marijuana Seller Takes Plea Deal

2013-06-03T10:55:00.001-07:00

New York Times

A medical marijuana store owner whose prosecution by the federal authorities highlighted vast disparities in how California and the Justice Department are responding to the medical marijuana industry abandoned a six-month battle against Washington on Friday and pleaded guilty to 10 charges of marijuana cultivation and distribution.

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California Senate passes bill to curb prescription drug abuse

2013-06-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

The state Senate on Thursday unanimously passed the last bill in a broad package of proposed reforms aimed at combating prescription drug abuse and mounting overdose deaths in California. The bills, inspired by a series of investigative stories in The Times, would help authorities track drug abusing patients as well as doctors who overprescribe painkillers and other addictive narcotics. One bill would give the state medical board the power to immediately suspend the prescribing privileges of doctors suspected of putting patients at risk.

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Marijuana regulatory bill stalls in California Legislature (blog)

2013-06-03T10:54:00.001-07:00

Sacramento Bee

Lawmakers quashed a bill that would have created a state agency to tax and regulate California's overgrown medical marijuana landscape on Friday. Since California voters gave the green light to medical cannabis in 1996, the state has seen cities and municipalities deal with quasi-legal pot in a variety of different ways, with critics saying many dispensaries serve all comers under the pretense of helping the sick.

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Affordable Care Act's challenge: getting young adults enrolled

2013-06-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

Los Angeles Times

Arsine Sargsyan is 23 years old, healthy and uninsured. She chooses to forgo coverage for one simple reason: "I never get sick." Despite her reluctance, Sargsyan is exactly the type of person insurance plans, states and the federal government are counting on to make health reform work.

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California health exchange tops expectations

2013-06-03T10:53:00.000-07:00

Modesto Bee

Californians can breathe a sigh of relief over a crucial first step in implementing health care reform. State officials last week unveiled the health plans and premium rates that will be available under the California health exchange. They show the market is working as intended — actually better.

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New insurance market taking shape

2013-06-03T10:52:00.001-07:00

HealthyCal.org

California’s new health insurance marketplace is starting to come into focus as a state agency in charge of implementing President Obama’s federal health reform steadily adds more and more detail to the emerging picture, like a painter filling in a vast canvass. But exactly how the final image will look to consumers remains a bit murky. And we probably won’t know the answer until after the health benefits exchange, known as Covered California, opens for business Oct. 1.

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Obamacare's California dreamin'

2013-06-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

Politico

The best news for Obamacare these days is coming out of California — but it’s a best-case scenario that might not work everywhere else in the country. The state surprised many when it announced that there won’t be any big price hikes for the health plans available through its insurance exchange — the marketplace that will serve people who don’t have another place to get health coverage.

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More Children Poisoned By Parents' Prescription Drugs

2013-06-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

NPR

Dad takes a cholesterol-lowering statin so he'll be around to see the kids grow up. But statins, like Lipitor and Zocor, as well as some other common adult prescription drugs are causing a rise in poisonings among children, a study says. The big surprise is that children are at risk not just from opioid painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin, which most parents know need to be kept away from kids.

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Viewpoints: Program aims to reduce teenage prescription drug abuse

2013-05-08T16:23:00.003-07:00

Sacramento Bee

The Bee recently featured articles on the problem of prescription drug abuse and the need to talk with teens. While still a public menace, illicit substances like heroin and cocaine have taken a back seat to the abuse of legal prescription medications. Many of these medications when misused or altered in some way – melted, pulverized, mixed with some other substance, injected into blood vessels – are just as addictive as many illicit drugs and can have at least as harmful side effects and morbidity. Even worse, prescription drugs are the second most common cause of accidental death in the United States.

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Feds sue landlord of Berkeley marijuana dispensary

2013-05-08T16:23:00.001-07:00

Fresno Bee

The federal government is suing Berkeley's largest medical marijuana outlet with the goal of seizing the property from its landlord. The Contra Costa Times reports the suit accuses Berkeley Patients Group of breaking federal drug laws by allowing the sale of marijuana. It claims landlord Nahla Droubi is subject to seizure of her property.

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Medicare charges vary widely at California hospitals, new data show

2013-05-08T16:22:00.003-07:00

Los Angeles Times

Federal officials are shedding new light on how much hospital bills vary across Southern California and the rest of the country. Medicare released pricing information Wednesday for more than 3,300 U.S. hospitals on the top 100 procedures and treatments in 2011. The federal health program for seniors and private insurers only pays a fraction of these billed charges.

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Wal-Mart Could Transform Health Care. But Does it Want to?

2013-05-08T16:22:00.001-07:00

California Healthline

"Why is Wal-Mart speaking at a health care summit?" the company's vice president for health and wellness, Marcus Osborne, rhetorically offered up at a conference back in January. "Wal-Mart's in retail, we're not in health care." But as analysts, researchers, and other experts who spoke with "Road to Reform" took care to point out, Wal-Mart is in health care, and getting further entrenched by the year. In the past six months alone, Wal-Mart launched a major contracting initiative with half-a-dozen major hospitals, and dropped hints -- since retracted -- that the company is exploring new services like a health insurance exchange.

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