Healthcare Regulation and Reform

As the pool of uninsured shrinks, public hospital systems must increasingly compete for newly insured patients. “We're forcing public hospitals to compete in one of the most competitive industries that has ever existed in the economy,” said one county health director.

After months of reporting on immigrants' experiences in enrolling for health coverage, reporter Momo Chang still didn't have the long cover story she'd envisioned. But she stayed flexible and ended up with a compact news story that focused on a single facet of immigrant enrollment.

With millions of their patients newly insured because of health care reform, community health centers, once viewed as providers of last resort, are remaking themselves as providers of choice.

As the number of California Medicaid enrollees signing up for coverage has grown, the number of doctors hasn't always been able to meet the demand for care. The problem has been especially acute among Chinese-Americans, many of whom struggle to find physicians willing to see them.

With Obamacare's second season of open enrollment underway, advocates remain focused on signing up the remaining uninsured. In California, the uninsured rate is projected to drop to 6 percent by 2019. But getting it much lower will require creative new strategies.

Is Obamacare really at risk now that Republicans have taken the Senate? The core of the law will likely survive, thanks to the presidential veto power. Still, sections of it could be pruned away by the legislature. Here are a few possibilities the media has highlighted.

Proposition 46, the California ballot measure backed by plaintiffs’ attorneys and opposed by physicians, was soundly defeated by a 2-to-1 margin. The fact that Proposition 46 was a bundle trying to be all things to all patient safety advocates was probably its downfall.

After a resounding defeat Tuesday, backers of Prop. 45 vow to press on with efforts to give California's insurance commissioner greater regulatory authority over insurance rates. Meanwhile, one prominent health policy expert said the failed measure was "a huge threat to health reform in the state."

Last fall, we had no idea how the Obamacare rollout was going to go. So Politico's Jennifer Haberkorn hit the road, and found very different experiences between states. She shares some of the lessons learned along the way, and how she found enrollees willing to tell their stories.

The Affordable Care Act has made it easier to obtain drug addiction treatment services like methadone in California, but access to detox centers remains limited.