Insights

A California law allows courts to order assisted outpatient treatment for people with a history of serious mental illness and violence. This raises a dilemma: Should society be able to force mentally ill individuals to get treatment, or does that amount to a infringement on their civil liberties?

The complexities of health reform are enough to make anybody’s head seize up, let alone the diligent health reporter who is expected to serve as guide to all the policy changes.

Inefficiencies, profiteering, and disregard for evidence-based medicine plague our health care system, Otis Brawley of the American Cancer Society told the 2013 California Health Journalism Fellows. The coming "tsunami of chronic disease" stands to intensify the situation.

Why is the high school dropout rate in the San Joaquin Valley among the highest in the California? CapRadio will produce a documentary that tells stories of youth and adults touched by the dropout crisis with accuracy, depth, nuance and respect.

California supplies most of the nation’s strawberries with more grown in Oxnard than in any other place in the state, according to the USDA. Many of the berries grown in this area are picked by people who face slum living conditions, back-breaking labor, pesticide exposure and limited health care.

In the Northwestern corner of California, a David and Goliath battle set in the impenetrable world of modern medicine is playing out as a small community musters everything they have to block a multi-billion dollar medical corporation’s attempt to centralize operations. 

An Allied NATO Government cover-up so catastrophic that it's really 3-in-1....

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) says that America's fastest-growing developmental disability, autism, is hitting the Hispanic community especially hard. It's now being diagnosed among Latino children at an alarming rate.

My California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowship will explore various forms of trauma in communities stricken by gang violence -- its toll on individuals, families and neighborhoods; its sources; local efforts to move communities forward; and the obstacles it poses to making change a reality.

Possibilities for funding California's now useless prescription drug monitoring program range from charging drug companies a penny or less per prescription or levying a small licensing fee to medical providers and pharmacies.