ReportWire

Tag: california hospital

  • GOP lawmaker proposes measure to block key element of proposed California wealth tax

    [ad_1]

    WASHINGTON — As progressives seek to place a new tax on billionaires on California’s November ballot, a Republican congressman is moving in the opposite direction: proposing federal legislation that would block states from taxing the assets of former residents.

    Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-Rocklin), who faces a tough reelection challenge under California’s redrawn congressional maps, says he will introduce the “Keep Jobs in California Act of 2026” on Friday. The measure would prohibit any state from levying taxes retroactively on individuals who no longer live there.

    The proposed legislation adds another layer to what has already been a fiery debate over California’s approach to taxing the ultrawealthy. It has created divisions among Democrats and has placed Los Angeles at the center of a broader political fight, with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) set to hold a rally on Wednesday night in support of the wealth tax.

    Kiley said he drafted the bill in reaction to reports that several of California’s most prominent billionaires — including Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin — are planning to leave the state in anticipation of the wealth tax being enacted.

    “California’s proposed wealth tax is an unprecedented attempt to chase down people who have already left as a result of the state’s poor policies,” Kiley said in a statement Wednesday. “Many of our state’s leading job creators are leaving preemptively.”

    Kiley said it would be “fundamentally unfair” to retroactively impose taxes on former residents.

    “California already has the highest income tax of any state in the country, the highest gas tax, the highest overall tax burden,” Kiley said in a House floor speech this month. “But a wealth tax is something unique because a wealth tax is not merely the taxation of earned income, it is the confiscation of assets.”

    The fate of Kiley’s proposal is just as uncertain as his future in Congress. His 5th Congressional District, which hugs the Nevada border, has been sliced up into six districts under California’s voter-approved Proposition 50, and he has not yet picked one to run in for reelection.

    The Billionaire Tax Act, which backers are pushing to get on the November ballot, would charge California’s 200-plus billionaires a one-time 5% tax on their net worth to backfill billions of dollars in Republican-led cuts to federal healthcare funding for middle-class and low-income residents. It is being proposed by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West.

    In his floor speech, Kiley worried that the tax, if approved, could cause the state’s economy to collapse.

    “What’s especially threatening about this is that our state’s tax structure is essentially a house of cards,” Kiley said. “You have a system that is incredibly volatile, where top 1% of earners account for 50% of the tax revenue.”

    But supporters of the wealth tax argue the measure is one of the few ways that can help the state seek new revenue as it faces economic uncertainty.

    Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, is urging Californians to back the measure, which he says would “provide the necessary funding to prevent more than 3 million working-class Californians from losing the healthcare they currently have — and would help prevent the closures of California hospitals and emergency rooms.”

    “It should be common sense that the billionaires pay just slightly more so that entire communities can preserve access to life-saving medical care,” Sanders said in a statement this month. “Our country needs access to hospitals and emergency rooms, not more tax breaks for billionaires.”

    Other Democrats are not so sure.

    Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is eyeing a presidential bid in 2028, has opposed the measure. He has warned a state-by-state approach to taxing the wealthy could stifle innovation and entrepreneurship.

    Some of the wealthiest people in the world are also taking steps to defeat the measure.

    Brin is donating $20 million to a California political drive to prevent the wealth tax from becoming law, according to a disclosure reviewed by the New York Times. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and the chairman of Palantir, has also donated millions to a committee working to defeat the proposed measure, the New York Times reported.

    [ad_2]

    Ana Ceballos

    Source link

  • California hospitals lagged in anti-bias training for pregnancy care providers

    California hospitals lagged in anti-bias training for pregnancy care providers

    [ad_1]

    California hospitals and clinics were slow to carry out mandated training intended to combat unconscious bias among workers who care for pregnant patients, the state Department of Justice found in a newly released investigation.

    Less than 17% of facilities that provided information to the state agency had initiated “implicit bias training” in the year after California started requiring it for pregnancy and childbirth professionals, according to the report unveiled Friday by California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta.

    The numbers shot up after Bonta prodded healthcare providers about their training plans: As of summer 2022, more than 93% of medical facilities that responded had trained at least some of their staff, according to the state investigation. By that time, an average of 81% of staff in responding facilities had finished the required training, the investigation found.

    Nearly a third of health facilities contacted by the Department of Justice launched their training programs only after the agency reached out to them, the report found.

    The state law went into effect just weeks before the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, but Bonta and other state officials rejected that as an explanation or excuse for delays, saying the required training could be accomplished through an online video.

    “It was doable then, “ Bonta said at a news conference Friday in Leimert Park. “It’s doable now.”

    The training mandate was prompted by concerns that implicit bias — unconsciously held attitudes about members of a specific group — can steer the decisions of medical providers, undermining patient care.

    SB 464, which was passed four years ago, required California hospitals, clinics and birthing centers that care for patients in pregnancy and childbirth to confront that problem by rolling out implicit bias programs for their staff. “Refresher” trainings for healthcare providers are also required every two years.

    Los Angeles County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who authored SB 464 as a state senator, said that while drafting the law, she and others were appalled to learn about persistent misconceptions about Black women among medical students. Mitchell said surveys showed that “they thought our threshold for pain was higher, that our skin was thicker and more difficult to penetrate to receive medication.”

    To think that such attitudes persisted in 2019 “literally took our breath away,” she said.

    SB 464 spelled out specific requirements for the training content, including identification of unconscious biases; corrective measures to reduce such bias at both the interpersonal and institutional levels; and information on the effects of historical and contemporary exclusion and oppression of minority communities.

    State officials said such training is urgent due to the crisis facing Black patients in childbirth. Across the country, Black women have been about 2½ times more likely than their white and Latina counterparts to die during pregnancy, childbirth and its aftermath, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In a national survey, 30% of Black women reported mistreatment during maternity care and 40% reported discrimination; both rates were much higher than among white or Asian American women.

    California has reduced its rates of maternal death over time, but they have remained more than three times higher for Black patients than for those of many other racial and ethnic backgrounds.

    “Far too many Black women are dying during and post-childbirth in L.A. County, in the state of California, and across the country,” Mitchell said Friday. “And what’s so deeply offensive about that is it’s within our power to change that.”

    In L.A. County this year, family and friends called for justice after the deaths of April Valentine and Bridgette Cromer, also known as Bridgette Burks. Both were Black women who lost their lives after childbirth at local hospitals. Both hospitals were faulted by state investigators in the aftermath of their deaths.

    Mitchell said it was painful to see that women in her county district had “died unnecessarily because they weren’t listened to, they weren’t attended to, they were in hospitals who should and must do better.”

    A spokesperson for the California Hospital Assn., which supported the legislation, said hospitals in the state are committed to reducing health disparities and “still working toward full compliance despite the challenges created by the COVID pandemic that surfaced just a few months after” SB 464 passed.

    Californians can check how far their local hospitals had gone toward training staff as of last year: The report released Friday includes a list of facilities that provide pregnancy care and the percentage of their covered staff that had finished the required training by July 2022. Across the state, those figures ranged from 0 to 100%.

    Bonta said deadlines for finishing the required trainings, clear mechanisms for state enforcement, and consequences for hospitals that flout the California law are needed to improve compliance. He said he was committing to working with state lawmakers “to address these issues with future legislation.”

    [ad_2]

    Emily Alpert Reyes

    Source link