Latest news with #CaliforniaStateLegislature
Business Wire
30-05-2025
- Health
- Business Wire
Prop 56 Cuts: Patients Will Suffer from Lack of Access to Proper Dental and Oral Healthcare – Leading to Severe and Costly Chronic Health Problems
ORANGE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Western Dental, California's largest Medi-Cal dental provider, with 223 offices in 35 counties across the state, will be forced to close offices if the current proposal to cut Proposition 56 funding moves forward. The company is evaluating the extent of the expected closures, along with other measures to offset the significant impact to dental offices. Proposition 56, a measure overwhelmingly passed by California voters in 2016, directed revenue from a new tobacco tax to increase access to care for individuals and families that qualify for Medi-Cal (California's version of Medicaid) dental services. Prop 56 has not only made it possible for California dentists to provide access and care to more patients but also allowed new providers to open their doors and create a more stabilized and equitable health care system throughout the state, including areas where dentists were previously in short supply for everyone. 'Medi-Cal dental has been significantly under-resourced for decades. Proposition 56 provided critical funding that helped Western Dental open more than 100 new offices across the state and serve millions of patients, many in underserved areas who were otherwise without access to care,' said Preet Takkar, Chief Executive Officer of Western Dental. 'The current budget proposal represents dramatic cuts to dental reimbursement rates, which would make it impossible to keep many of these new offices open, while also impacting additional practices statewide. This proposal would reignite the dental access crisis that existed before the passage of Prop 56 and would ultimately cost the state more in the long run. Unfortunately, dental practices like ours across California will have to make tough choices—reassessing staffing, hours, and office locations—if this funding is eliminated.' Today, Western Dental employs more than 4,000 people in California, including more than 750 dentists and hygienists who provide more than 1 million Medi-Cal patient visits every year. 'Dental care is more than just getting your teeth cleaned. It's essential primary care for children and systemic care for adults,' said Dr. Peter Truong, Western Dental's Chief Dental Officer. 'If dental care is eliminated or reduced, patients suffer adverse health consequences, including tooth decay, gum disease, systemic health issues and social and economic impacts that are far more costly to treat. Eliminating access to dental care will have significant health consequences for millions of Californians. 'Western Dental will be forced to make hard decisions in the coming weeks and months, should Prop 56 funding be eliminated. Unfortunately, that will likely include closing as many as 50 offices, reducing staff in many offices and reducing the number of Medi-Cal dental patients each practice is able to treat. The choices made by the Governor and California State Legislature will have a direct and immediate impact on access to necessary health care and jobs lost should Prop 56 funding be redirected and removed from dental care' added Mr. Takkar. About Western Dental Western Dental has been serving California communities for over 100 years, with a strong commitment to delivering high-quality, affordable dental care. With over 200 locations across the state, Western Dental provides a full spectrum of services including general dentistry, orthodontics, and pediatric care — creating a convenient, comprehensive 'Dental Home' for families across California. As part of the Sonrava Health family of brands, Western Dental shares in the mission to expand access and drive innovation in dental care.
Epoch Times
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
Barbara Lee Wins Tight Race for Oakland Mayor in Special Election
Former U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee has won the special election for mayor of Oakland in the San Francisco Bay Area to replace former Mayor Sheng Thao, who was recalled by Oakland voters and indicted by federal authorities for alleged bribery offenses. The former congresswoman Lee's main opponent, former councilman Loren Taylor, called Lee the morning of April 19 to concede the race, she said in a 'I accept your choice with a deep sense of responsibility, humility, and love,' Lee, a Democrat, said in a statement posted to her campaign website. 'Oakland is a deeply divided City, and I answered the call to run, to unite our community—so that I can represent every voter, and we can all work together as One Oakland to solve our most pressing problems,' she said. Lee credited a coalition that includes faith, labor, and businesses for her victory. She pledged to govern with transparency, integrity, and accountability. Related Stories 4/14/2025 4/21/2025 'I will do the hard work and make the tough decisions, knowing that we will all be doing this together,' she said. 'While the challenges are many, the opportunities are great.' Taylor, also a Democrat, 'We gained the support of nearly half the voting population despite having political insiders and labor unions spend heavily, spread lies, and rally against our efforts, and your hopes for the city,' Taylor said. 'I pray that Mayor-Elect Lee fulfills her commitment to unify Oakland by authentically engaging the ... Oaklanders who voted for me and who want pragmatic results-driven leadership,' he wrote. Lee, who was born in El Paso, Texas, and served as a U.S. representative from 1998 to 2025. She also served in both houses of the California State Legislature from 1990 to 1998. While a student at Mills College, which merged with Northeastern University in 2022, she was involved with the Black Panther Party. In the House, she chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Congressional Black Caucus and was a founder of the LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus. In the lead up to the Iraq War, Lee was the only congress member to vote against authorizing the use of force in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Lee ran on a platform of improving public safety, homelessness, and accountability, and reducing corruption.
Yahoo
04-04-2025
- Automotive
- Yahoo
California bill would raise ages for booster seats, front seat passengers
A bill advancing in the California State Legislature could change how millions of children ride in vehicles. Last week, the Assembly Transportation Committee voted in favor of advancing AB 435, which would require all children under 10 to use booster seats and ban children under 13 from sitting in the front seat. Under current California law, kids must use booster seats until they are 8 years old or reach a height of 4 feet 9 inches. The bill's author, Assemblymember Lori Wilson (D-Suisun City), cited national statistics that show child injuries and fatalities in crashes have increased since the pandemic, and kids 8 to 12 are disproportionately affected. She argues that vehicle restraints and airbags are generally designed for adults. 'God forbid something happens; we want our children to be safe,' Wilson told the committee. In order to sit in the front seat, a child would need to pass a five-step test: The child must be seated all the way back against the car seat. The child's knees must bend comfortably over the edge of the seat. The shoulder belt fits snugly across the center of the child's chest and shoulder, not the neck. The lap belt sits as low as possible, touching the child's or ward's thighs. The child can remain seated in this position for the entire trip. In theory, this means shorter teens could be required to stay in the back seat until they can drive. Violations would carry a $20 ticket for the first offense and $50 for each subsequent violation. Wilson's bill has the backing of several influential public health and safety groups, including AAA, the Automobile Club of Southern California and Rady Children's Hospital. If the bill becomes law, it will take effect in 2027. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Was She Crazy? Immoral? Menstruating? Or Just a Murderer?
Is it possible to tell the story of an American city through its scandals? For Gary Krist, who has previously unearthed histories of scoundrels and sinners in Chicago, New Orleans and Los Angeles, the lens of true crime brings into focus the welter of urban growth and social change. In 'Trespassers at the Golden Gate,' Krist's focus is an adulterous affair that culminated, in 1870, with a pistol shot, fired in fading daylight on the ferry that crossed San Francisco Bay. From its dramatic opening, Krist's book backtracks to chart San Francisco's astonishing growth, from a rough, polyglot outpost of prospectors attracted by the 1849 Gold Rush to a mature metropolis, which within 20 years counted respectable married women among its population of almost 150,000. The problem with the metaphor of maturation, which Krist and many of his sources rely on, is its implication that urban growth is preordained, written in the bone. It exonerates individuals and erases protest; it is the means by which the real forces at work here — white supremacy and patriarchy — cover their tracks. There were always those who did not conform: Krist's wide canvas is peopled with intriguing minor figures like Ah Toy, a Chinese immigrant sex worker; a French frog-catcher, Jeanne Bonnet, who fell afoul of restrictions on cross-dressing; and Mary Ellen Pleasant, a civil rights pioneer who fought to desegregate the city's streetcars. But these individuals rarely had the means to bend the city to their own tastes and notions of justice. And when one of the men in power — a married lawyer named Alexander Parker Crittenden — was brazenly killed by his lover, the younger, licentious, murderous woman became the scapegoat, bearing all the sins of the city. Except for brief vignettes from the trial, Krist's narrative does not return to the scene of the crime for more than 200 pages. This structure demands a fair amount of investment in people whose motives and morals are muddled, at best. Crittenden, his wife and his lover, Laura Fair, had all migrated to San Francisco from the antebellum South, and carried with them the prejudices of those origins: They were pro-slavery, anti-Lincoln and, in due course, Confederate sympathizers (a cause for which the Crittendens' eldest son died). 'Unfortunately,' as Krist puts it rather mildly, it was Crittenden who, while briefly serving in the California State Legislature, was responsible for writing a 'notorious statute' banning the testimony of nonwhite defendants from admissibility in court. These were people who benefited from the restrictive moral code of a 'mature' Victorian city, even as they chafed at its constraints. Crittenden, who is described repeatedly as 'restless' or 'reckless,' did not amass a great deal of actual influence: His political ambitions were thwarted, and what money he earned ran through his hands like fool's gold. Still, he moved around the country freely, enjoying, as his frustrated lover put it, 'the man's thousand privileges,' which included leaving his wife and children for months or years on end. During one of those extended wanderings, in pursuit of the riches flowing out of Nevada's silver mines, Crittenden met Fair, then a 26-year-old with a young daughter, running a boardinghouse with her mother. 'Thrice married — twice divorced and once (somewhat suspiciously) widowed — the hotheaded and independent Fair refused to be fixed by the feminine clichés of her time. Amid the rampant speculation in precious metals, she amassed a substantial investment portfolio and occasionally lent her lover money. But without a husband, her social position was always precarious. She was desperate for Crittenden to divorce his wife and marry her, but he prevaricated, lied and threatened suicide or murder should she break off their affair. After seven torturous years, it was Fair who broke. At her murder trial, journalists, lawyers and spectators struggled to make sense of her. Was she the victim of an evil seducer, a wronged woman trying to claim her rights as a wife of the heart, if not the law? Had she been driven mad? And if so, by her emotions, her menstrual cycle or both? Was her trial a case of singular insanity, or a referendum on the moral stature of the entire city of San Francisco, as the prosecution urged? Or was Laura Fair a symbol of women's wholesale oppression, as the suffragists insisted? These questions remain open: As Krist puts it, the final judgments of Fair 'depended largely on the perspective of the person asked.' It's a logical but frustrating conclusion. The author's evenhandedness and scrupulous adherence to the documentary record are worthy qualities in a writer of nonfiction, but they need a little passionate partisanship to fight against the inertia of 'it depends.' We're left wondering: What did this case mean for the city of San Francisco? And what might it mean for those reading about it today?
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
My country's shameful fight to keep Nazi-looted art
David Jimenez is a Spanish journalist and author, and is the former editor in chief of El Mundo. MADRID — For a country that gave the world Picasso and boasts some of the finest art collections in its museums, the decision should have been simple. When Camille Pissarro's 'Rue Saint-Honoré,' a painting stolen by the Nazis from Lilly Cassirer, was discovered by her grandson Claude in 2000 in Madrid's state-owned Thyssen-Bornemisza museum, Spain should have sent it to its rightful Jewish owners in California. Instead, my country has spent the past 25 years, a fortune in legal bills and its reputation to keep it. In doing so, Spain has placed itself in a dishonorable group of nations that obstruct the return of art stolen from victims of war and genocide, alongside countries such as Russia, Turkey and Romania. It is time for Madrid to acknowledge that, beyond the legal dispute, this case raises a far more essential moral issue. No piece of art, however valuable, is worth betraying the memory of Holocaust victims. The California State Legislature gave Spain yet another opportunity to do the right thing in September 2024 by passing a bill that would strengthen the claims of citizens seeking to recover stolen art held around the world. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed the bill into law surrounded by the children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Among them was David Cassirer, the last direct descendant of the family that has long fought to reclaim the Pissarro stolen by the Nazis from his great-grandmother, Lilly Cassirer. For the Cassirer family, the painting's material value (estimated at more than $50 million) has always been secondary. 'This painting symbolizes a chance for Holocaust victims and their families to recover at least a small part of what was taken,' David Cassirer told me, reflecting on the emotional toll the legal battle has had on his family. His father, mother and sister died without seeing the family's rightful claim to the Pissarro artwork affirmed. Armed with the California legislation, David Cassirer's attorneys filed a petition on Dec. 6 in the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which ruled, despite a prior unanimous Supreme Court ruling in the Cassirers' favor on a procedural issue, that Spain could keep the painting. Regardless of the court's decision this time, further legal battles are inevitable — something Spain should strive to avoid. Even the Thyssen museum's own lawyers do not dispute that Lilly Cassirer was coerced into handing the painting over to the Nazis in exchange for the documents she needed to escape Germany in 1939. 'Rue Saint-Honoré, Après-midi, Effet de Pluie' (Rue Saint-Honoré, Afternoon, Rain Effect), which Pissarro painted from his hotel window during the winter of 1897, passed through the hands of various private collectors before being acquired in 1976 by Baron Hans Heinrich von Thyssen-Bornemisza, whose family had close ties to Adolf Hitler. The collection's arrival in Spain came about through a romantic twist when the aristocrat married his fifth wife, Carmen Cervera, a former Miss Spain, whom he introduced to the world of art. Cervera would be instrumental in the baron's decision to sell to the Spanish state, in 1993, a collection that included 'Rue Saint-Honoré.' The Pissarro, measuring 32 by 26 inches, hangs on a wall in Room 33 of the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum in Madrid. Though it is an important work of 19th-century French impressionism, parting with it would hardly cause great damage to Spanish cultural heritage; keeping it illegitimately, on the other hand, has serious implications for art restitution rights around the world. A dangerous precedent is set every time a country, a museum or a private collector refuses to return a piece of art taken from victims of war, persecution or genocide. Spanish law permits the buyer of a stolen item to legalize it after having owned it uninterruptedly for six years. California's legislature tried to address this with the bill passed last year, stating that California law instead of foreign law must apply in lawsuits over art looted during the Holocaust and other persecution. Spain's laws represent a dream scenario for art traffickers. My country now risks becoming a haven for looted art. Other than exploiting Spain's 'finders-keepers' law, the main argument Spain has raised over the years has been that Lilly Cassirer was compensated for her loss when she accepted a reparation payment of 120,000 deutsche marks from Germany in 1958, netting her $13,000. But the family and the German government were unaware of the whereabouts of the 'Rue Saint-Honoré' at the time. And Germany's Supreme Court and the federal courts in California have conclusively held that Germany's 1958 payment does not preclude the Cassirers from being able to physically recover the painting. The family has also promised, in the court record, that if it does recover the painting, it will repay Germany. Spain's insistence on advancing this inaccurate narrative of greed on the family's part is very troubling. Returning the painting to Lilly Cassirer's last living descendant would be an act of justice and would send a clear message that Spain takes the memory of the victims of the Holocaust seriously. A Eurobarometer survey revealed in 2019 that 66 percent of Spaniards do not believe that denying the Holocaust is a problem, way above the European average of 38 percent. Centuries-old prejudices against Jewish people and lack of proper education regarding the Holocaust are contributing to a rise in antisemitism. By returning the Pissarro, the Spanish government would set the right example.
