California doctor to plead guilty to charges of illegally prescribing drugs at Starbucks

Associated Press

A Southern California doctor has agreed to plead guilty to charges of illegally prescribing drugs to his patients at nightly meetings in Starbucks stores. Court documents show 44-year-old Alvin Mingczech Yee entered into a plea agreement earlier this week. He is expected to plead guilty to seven counts at a April 17 hearing. Prosecutors say Yee saw up to a dozen patients nightly at Starbucks coffee stores across suburban Orange County at meetings that cost up to $600. Prosecutors say Yee barely examined them but prescribed drugs including OxyContin and Vicodin.

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Brown to Grant Pardons to Former Convicts, Former SB Narcotics Criminal

Daily Nexus (UCSB)

Gov. Jerry Brown announced plans to pardon 65 various individuals convicted of drug possession and other low-level crimes, including Richard Brent DeLeon, a drug dealer from Santa Barbara County. All of those granted clemency had finished their sentence and lived free from custody for at least 10 years. DeLeon served a four-year prison sentence and served at least eight months on probation in October 1991 for possession of a narcotic with the intent to sell.

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Gambling Addiction

New York Times (Opinion by President and CEO of the American Gaming Association)

We were pleased to see that Clyde Haberman shed light on the important issue of gambling addiction in his March 25 “Breaking Bread” column, “An Ex-Gambler Weighs the Cost of Addiction.” This is an issue that our industry takes seriously, and it’s understandable that a discussion of gambling expansion would lead to increased discussion of gambling addiction.

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Citing the sequester, cancer clinics reject Medicare patients

San Jose Mercury News

Cancer clinics across the country have begun turning away thousands of Medicare patients and blaming the sequester budget cuts. Oncologists say the reduced funding, which took effect for Medicare on April 1, makes it impossible to administer expensive chemotherapy drugs while staying afloat financially. Patients at these clinics would need to seek treatment elsewhere, but the only real alternatives are hospitals, which generally offer more expensive care and which may not be equipped to handle the influx.

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Marijuana legalization wins majority support nationwide

Los Angeles Times

A majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana, a new poll shows, with the change driven largely by a huge shift in how the baby boom generation feels about the drug of their youth. By 52%-45%, adult Americans back legalization, according to the survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center. The finding marks the first time in more than four decades of Pew's polling that a majority has taken that position. As recently as a decade ago, only about one-third of American adults backed making marijuana legal.

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California Cities Have a Revenue and a Spending Problem

Bloomberg

Yesterday morning, I saw a presentation from Tom Tait, the mayor of Anaheim, California, on fostering economic development in a time of fiscal stress. He presented two charts that reinforce the fact that California's cities have both a revenue problem and a spending problem. The first chart shows Anaheim's total compensation costs per employee, which rose about 70 percent from 2001 to 2012 (more than 30 percent after adjusting for inflation). Real wages per employee were flat over this period; the entire inflation-adjusted increase is attributable to benefits, which grew by 130 percent per-employee. This is Anaheim's spending problem: It's spending too much on employee benefits.

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Researchers 'Turn Off' Drug Addiction In Rats Using Lasers

RTTNews

Laser treatment has show promise in controlling drug addiction in rats, according to a research team at University of California, San Francisco. In their study, the researchers effectively turned cocaine addiction in rats on and off with the use of a laser and light-sensitive proteins implanted in the brain. The genetically engineered proteins, called rhodopsins, were administered into the nerve cells in the rats' prefrontal cortex. These proteins could then be activated and deactivated using a laser.

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CVS to pay US $11 million in lawsuit settlement

KOCO Oklahoma City

A major pharmacy retailer has agreed to pay $11 million to the United States to settle civil penalty claims for record-keeping violations under the Controlled Substances Act and related regulations, announced Sanford C. Coats, United States Attorney for the Western District of Oklahoma. The United States has alleged that from Oct. 6, 2005 to Oct. 5, 2011, CVS pharmacy retail stores in Oklahoma and elsewhere violated the CSA and the record-keeping regulations by: 1. Creating, entering and maintaining invalid “dummy” DEA registration numbers or numbers other than the valid Drug Enforcement Administration registration number of the prescribing practitioner on dispensing records, which were at times provided to state prescription drug monitoring programs [..].

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Local law enforcement agencies looking to curtail prescription drug abuse

Merced Sun-Star

Some of the most commonly abused drugs also happen to be the most accessible, and law enforcement is trying to curb that trend. National Drug Take Back Day is coming up at the end of the month. The program allows residents to take unused or unwanted prescription drugs to designated drop-off sites to safely dispose of them. The event will take place from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 27 at the Merced County Sheriff's Department, UC Merced Police Department and for the second time at the Livingston Police Department.

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Businesses to IRS: Please Change Forgotten Obamacare Tax

CNBC

Businesses and wealthy owners of estates and trusts have asked the IRS for changes to a part of President Barack Obama's 2010 health-care law that has received comparatively little attention: a 3.8 percent tax on investment income intended to provide the bulk of the law's funding. The tax kicks in this year, with U.S. taxpayers accounting for it for the first time in their tax returns for 2013. It is projected to raise more than $100 billion over a decade to help pay for health insurance for millions of Americans who lack it.

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Immigrant Health Care: Many Not Eligible for Medicaid Expansion

California Healthline

"Despite the far-reaching potential expansion of Medicaid under the [Affordable Care Act], our estimates demonstrate that a substantial portion of low-income uninsured adults will be ineligible for Medicaid because of their immigration status." That is a key finding of a new study by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which highlights four states with high percentages of immigrants: Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas. In these states, the challenge of developing "strategies for meeting the health care needs of" immigrants will be "particularly difficult for safety-net providers in states with large numbers of immigrants who will not be eligible for Medicaid."

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California Insurance Commissioner slams Anthem Blue Cross

Examiner.com

The California Department of Insurance issued a statement today condemning Anthem Blue Cross's latest rate increase in the small group market as "excessive and unreasonable." Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones cited the return on equity for Anthem, which is a for-profit organization unlike affiliated Blue Shield of California. The department also accused Anthem of charging taxes and fees in 2013 that are to be imposed in 2014.

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Dan Walters: California safety net bills will test Jerry Brown

Sacramento Bee

The first two budgets that Jerry Brown proposed after returning to the governorship cleaved deeply into California's safety net of health and welfare services serving the aged, disabled and poor. Welfare grants and medical care payments were cut, and eligibility for those and other benefits was tightened – all needed, Brown said, to bring a deficit-ridden budget under control.

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Kaiser Medical Center to Accept Expired, Leftover Prescription Drugs

Patch.com

If you have expired or unused prescription medication in your cabinet, Kaiser Medical Center is willing to help take them off your hands. Kaiser is joining with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and local law enforcement agencies in observance of National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, wherein people can safely get rid of drugs they no longer need.

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Insurers see way to dodge federal healthcare law next year

Los Angeles Times

A new fight is brewing over health insurance companies letting millions of Americans renew their current coverage for another year — and thereby avoid changes under the federal healthcare law. That may offer a short-term benefit for certain consumers and shield some of those individual policyholders from potentially steep rate increases. But critics say this maneuver could undermine government efforts to remake the insurance market next year and keep premiums affordable overall.

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California health premiums for individual buyers will rise under federal program, study finds

Sacramento Bee

Middle-class Californians counting on the federal health care overhaul to lower their insurance premiums are in for a double-digit shock next year, a new state study shows.

People or families who buy insurance for themselves could see rate increases of up to 30 percent. Millman consulting group performed the analysis, but the scope was limited to the individual market, meaning about 5 million Californians who do not receive insurance through their employers.

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Affordable Care Act opens doors for the undocumented

Santa Cruz Sentinel

Clinic director Fred Bauermeister has watched them pass through his doors for decades: chronically ill, uninsured men, women and children, who have delayed medical care because they are in the country illegally. Now, though, a political deal may be in the works that, after many years, could bring health benefits to millions of undocumented people.

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California Gets Federal Nod to Coordinate Care for Most Vulnerable Patients

New America Media

California became the fifth and largest state this week to win federal approval for a new plan aimed at improving care for almost a half-million of the state’s most vulnerable patients. Called Cal MediConnect, the new three-year demonstration program initially will enable the eight counties to pool funding and resources for so-called “dual-eligibles,” lower-income people who qualify both for federal Medicare and the federal-state Medi-Cal program for the poor (California’s name for Medicaid).

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