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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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