See what's happening with the California Health Benefits Review Program!
Letter from the Director 

Greetings! Welcome to CHBRP's Summer Quarterly Newsletter. 

I hope that all of our readers are getting some time to downshift from some of their professional responsibilities, and that you are enjoying Summer trips, vacations, and time with family and friends.

In July, CHBRP was fortunate to move into the new School of Public Health building at UC Berkeley's campus. With an interim stop in the Forestry Building, we have been waiting to move to the School of Public Health since arriving on campus in late 2017. While we are still under the Office of Research, we look forward to opportunities to collaborate with new colleagues and students in the School of Public Health.

Also this summer, we had the opportunity to sit down face-to-face with our Faculty Task Force members and contributors  these are the faculty, researchers, analysts, and librarians from several UC campuses, who complete CHBRP's analyses with our staff. These dedicated individuals make CHBRP's bill analyses possible, with rigorous work done over many late nights. Part of our ongoing efforts to continuously improve, share best practices, and train our newer members is to go over the previous season's bill analyses and fine-tune our approach and processes as we look ahead to the next year. The meeting flew by, and several workgroups have been launched on various projects to enhance and update our report templates, methods, and other resources for our readers.

Thank you for your continued interest in our work, and if you have suggestions or feedback you wish to share with us, we welcome it (I can be reached directly at  garen.corbett@chbrp.org). Warm wishes for an enjoyable Summer. 

 
Until next time,
Garen 


CHBRP's Faculty Task Force was welcomed to Berkeley for its semi-annual meeting on June 24, 2019.
CHBRP Staff News




We are delighted to welcome  Ana AshbyMPP, as a Policy Analyst with CHBRP! Ana was a graduate intern with CHBRP, while obtaining her MPP at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy. Previously, s he has worked as a staffer, lobbyist, organizer, and advocate on behalf of low-income communities, and supported ACA implementation in Minnesota from 2011-2017.  Her primary health care interest is in Medicaid, particularly 1115 waivers.
Welcome, Ana!


We are incredibly sad to say farewell to Karla Wood, CHBRP's Project Analyst of almost 10 years.  Some of you have worked with Karla on various projects over the years and know how tirelessly she has worked behind the scenes to ensure CHBRP's success. It is impossible to say how much we value her contributions and how missed she will be. Karla will be pursuing her Masters in Social Work, and we know she will be a wonderful social worker. Best of luck! 

2019 Bills - Current Status
 
CHBRP analyzed 15 bills in 2019. The reports, bill language as analyzed, follow up analyses, and Key Findings are available for each analysis at http://chbrp.org/completed_analyses/index.php

While many of the bills have been amended since CHBRP analyzed the versions as introduced, most if not all of each analysis is still relevant. Take a look at the analyses at the above link to see what impacts these bills may have on Californians. The following graphic shows the current status of bills that CHBRP analyzed in 2019.

DOUBLE-CLICK ON IMAGE TO EXPAND
Current as of July 25, 2019


CHBRP Stakeholder Meetings
 
Each summer, CHBRP staff meets with  each of its stakeholders, including legislative staff, health plans, and health plan associations to review the past  analytical  cycle and discuss any trends on the horizon. Here's a sampling of the stakeholders CHBRP will be meeting with this year:

 

Updated CHBRP Resources
 
CHBRP has updated several policy briefs and resources this year:

  • Health Insurance Benefit Mandates in California State and Federal Law (January 2019)
  • Estimates of Sources of Health Insurance in California for 2020 (March 2019)
  • Estimates in Pharmacy Benefit Coverage in California for 2020 (March 2019)
  • CHBRP Analyses and Amendments of California Assembly and Senate Bills (June 2019)
  • Federal Preventive Services Mandate and California Mandates (July 2019)

All of the documents can be accessed on our website.

Faculty Spotlight: Janet M. Coffman, PhD, MPP, MA

Dr. Coffman is Professor of Health Policy and Family and Community Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She has worked with CHBRP since 2006 and has served as Vice Chair for the Medical Effectiveness team since 2016. Outside of CHBRP, Dr. Coffman's primary affiliation is with UCSF's Healthforce Center, where she conducts research on the health care workforce and access to care, primarily in California. Dr. Coffman currently leads a team in evaluating a set of pilot projects that are testing several different models for utilizing paramedics beyond their traditional roles of treating patients on site and transporting them to an emergency department. She also enjoys her role as Co-Director of the UCSF/UC-Hastings online Master of Science in Health Policy and Law program as this provides the opportunity to teach and interact with students.
Before pursuing her doctorate, Dr. Coffman worked as a health care legislative aide in Washington, DC for the US Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. Here she became hooked on health care and she says "...it was fate or serendipity that led me to health policy but I remain in the field due to my commitment to using my skills and knowledge to help improve the US health care system." Following this, Dr. Coffman worked as a staff researcher at UCSF, where she was fortunate to work on a physician workforce/education chart book ("California Needs Better Medicine") that laid the groundwork for the large increases in state funding for physician residency training and loan repayment for primary care physicians in underserved California communities that have been enacted in recent years. 
Dr. Coffman finds her work with CHBRP to be very rewarding due to the opportunity to use her analytic skills to generate reports that state legislators use to inform their decisions about legislation. As an academic, she finds that it is sometimes difficult to see how her research has an impact on the health care system. In the case of CHBRP, Dr. Coffman knows that legislators and their staff will read her reports within days (if not hours) of receiving them and use them to make decisions about whether to approve the bill. Another very rewarding aspect of her work with CHBRP is the opportunity to work with smart, hard-working colleagues from multiple University of California campuses and multiple professions who share her passion for producing evidence to inform policy.
Faculty Spotlight: Shana Charles, PhD, MPP

Dr. Charles is a facu lty associate with the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at CSU Fullerton. She has been a Cost Lead on the CHBRP Faculty Task Force since 2009. Outside of CHBRP, Dr. Charles directs the State of Health Insurance in California project, which publishes estimates of state insurance aspects. She finds it very satisfying when this data is used to inform new bills and to fight against detrimental policies. Dr. Charles also finds it rewarding to be a CSU professor as undergraduates fuel California's growth and nearly half of these students are the first in their families to go to college. She says: "When I teach them how to engage with health policy, and how to tell good statistics from biased data, it's truly the part I enjoy most."
Dr. Charles grew up in a family focused on health, with a working mom who had an MPH and a dad who was a psychiatrist. As an undergraduate political science major, her interests lay more in politics, but she gravitated towards public policy courses in her minor as well. When she realized that politics only mattered because policy affected people's lives, she made the move to public policy. Then she found out about health policies that literally could improve the lives of tens of millions of people through expansions of public health insurance, and she hasn't looked back since.
In addition to her research, teaching and CHBRP commitments, Dr. Charles is the Chair of the Community Development Citizens Committee for Fullerton. This year, the Committee donated over $250,000 to local nonprofits, including groups that provide services to the homeless, job training to foster youth, and free after-school care for low-income children. They also were able to allocate roughly $1 million to infrastructure and housing improvement in low-income areas in Fullerton.
Dr. Charles explains that CHBRP analyses remind her of a haiku poem. The structure of the report itself is very strict and prescribed, but within those boundaries, the topics vary widely and there's an art to determining exactly what information would best inform the legislature, and exactly how to present that information. She takes great pride in every CHBRP report she produces, knowing that the highest policymakers of the fifth largest economy in the world use the data in the report in their decision making process.


  
Follo w us on Social Media!
Get the latest news and updates from CHBRP. Follow us on:

California Health Benefits Review Program | info@chbrp.org| 510.664.5306 |   www.chbrp.org
See what's happening on our social sites: