The question before voters is whether the drug companies should regulate themselves, as laid out in Proposition 78, or whether the state should be granted authority to pressure drug companies into providing discounts, as specified in Proposition 79. If both initiatives pass, whichever receives the most votes becomes law.
This month House Republicans will try to wrap up work on proposals aimed at slowing the hemorrhage of red ink from federal budget ledgers while finding a way to pay for hundreds of billions of dollars of hurricane relief and for two wars that don\’t seem about to end anytime soon.
When Lori Marx-Rubiner underwent a bilateral mastectomy two years ago, she lost the use of her arms for a few weeks. She couldn\’t brush her teeth, let alone tackle cooking dinner or driving her son to school.
Michael Gabai is on a quest. The owner and administrator of Ayres Residential Care Home has spent the last two weeks calling physicians, senior centers, grocery stores and pharmacies in search of flu shots for about half of the 18 residents in his facilities who have been unable to get one.
Just as it seemed his honeymoon governorship was degenerating into insults and whining, Arnold Schwarzenegger finally signed a $105 billion state budget on July 31, about a month late.
In this presidential campaign year, the figure is ubiquitous: One out of four Americans, about 70 million people, do not have health insurance.
Today we are beset with a series of health-care plagues, each seeming worse than the one before. The number of Californians without health-care insurance coverage hovers between 6 million and 7 million people — that\’s about one in five of us. About 85 percent of those people are working in jobs where health care is not provided. Nationwide, health-care costs are the second largest cause of personal bankruptcy.
Several programs that cater to a largely Jewish clientele have survived California\’s budget ax — for now.
Nearly 200 Jews descended on Sacramento this week to lobby California\’s most powerful politicians to protect major programs that serve the poorest and frailest Jews and other Californians from the budget ax.
\”We have a continuing crisis in this country of millions of Americans without health insurance, and that\’s just plain wrong,\” said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles), who will speak Friday, April 25 at Leo Baeck Temple as part of a series on health care.
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