In the News

Bill would prohibit cigarettes and other tobacco products near games and practices

Idea came from eighth-grade class at Elk Grove school

By Alexei Koseff

akoseff@sacbee.com

State Sen. Richard Pan is taking another swing at tobacco.

Experts in  California health care agree: The present system is unsustainable.   It needs more money and flexibility.

But that’s where agreement ends.  There are conflicting ideas about where the money should come from and where it should go.

The problems are not difficult to find:  Health care in the Golden State is under increasing pressure because of an aging population, the addition of some four million people to the state’s already-vast MediCal system serving the poor and there are pockets of the medically underserved across the state, particularly in rural areas.

DR BOB SEARS, a paediatrician from Orange County, California, does not like to call his patients “free-riders”. True, he specialises in treating vaccine-sceptics, those families who resent being told to immunise their children against nasty diseases, from measles to whooping cough. It is also the case that, as a trained doctor, he believes that immunisation works. He agrees that some scary illnesses have almost vanished in America because more than 90% of children are inoculated against them, creating a herd immunity that leaves diseases with few places to lurk.

By Jeremy B. White

Responding to the Legislature’s renewed attempt to fund healthcare through a cigarette tax, a Brown administration official signaled support if the revenue is properly targeted.