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The federal government gives hospitals that care for uninsured and low-income patients more than $11 billion in funds annually, with California hospitals receiving more than $1 billion.

These hospitals, designated as Disproportionate Share Hospitals, can often be found in blue-collar, sometimes blighted, neighborhoods that have profound medical need:  Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center, San Francisco General Hospital & Trauma Center, and Tulare District Hospital in rural California, to name a few.

Last month, we chronicled the story of Jerry Magner, a Northern California man who suffered a massive stroke as a result of a surgery that was intended to prevent stroke. Magner’s loved ones, still struggling with their loss, questioned whether the procedure should have been performed in the first place.

Shortly after the stories ran and aired, I received this letter from John Maa, a surgeon and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco:

Now the feds are jumping in.

This morning, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced a national campaign to reduce elective deliveries of babies before 39 weeks of pregnancy, saying the effort will improve care and save millions.

Under the “Strong Start” initiative, the government will work with hospitals across the country that have joined the Partnership for Patients, a voluntary effort to reduce preventable injuries and complications.

Obstetricians hear it from their pregnant patients all the time: My back hurts. I’m swollen. I’m exhausted. Get this baby out of me!

“Why do I have to wait for 39 weeks if 37 is good enough?” some have asked Elliott Main, chairman of the ob-gyn department at San Francisco’s California Pacific Medical Center. “Women think it’s fine to deliver at 37 weeks,” he said.

Who can blame them? Technically, a “term pregnancy” is one between 37 and 42 weeks of gestation.

Not all of the California hospitals cracking down on early elective births are urban behemoths that deliver thousands of babies a year.

Small ones are taking action, too.

Banner Lassen Medical Center in the rural Northern California town of Susanville is a 25-bed hospital that delivers about 250 babies a year. In 2010, it implemented a policy prohibiting doctors from scheduling deliveries between weeks 37 and 39 of pregnancy without a medical reason, trying to put an end to deliveries scheduled for convenience.

Health officials say there’s a deadly threat to young people that most of us wouldn’t guess: murder.

According to the CDC homicide is the second leading cause of death for those between 15-24-years-old.

Overall, these deaths are a relatively small percentage of the country’s total mortality statistics. But public health experts are alarmed that gang violence continues to fuel homicides among young people.

A recently released CDC report studied five cities with high rates of gang murders.

Three of them were in California – Oakland, Long Beach and Los Angeles.

This is a corrected version of a blog that was published on January 25, 2012.

“Keep ‘em cooking.”

That’s what doctor organizations, advocates and hospital watchdog groups say about babies delivered before between 37 and 39 weeks gestation.

When I first heard that some surgeons don’t know how often their patients have major complications or die from a procedure, it was hard to believe. Could it be true that I can get more information about the quality of a flat screen TV or car, than a surgery that can kill me? 

I was told about how many hospitals lack a centralized database to track complications. Beyond that, for the hospitals that do try there isn’t a standardized system to compile and analyze the data.

But patient safety experts say without this information it’s hard for doctors to know how to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

There is another One Percent.

One percent of the population accounted for 22 percent of total health care expenditures in the United States. Five percent of the population accounted for nearly 50 percent of health care expenditures.

I didn’t know Sheryl when she wasn’t sick.

I didn’t know her as a preschool teacher, a mother, a churchgoer or dialysis support group leader. Every time I saw her, she was in a hospital bed, tethered to a dialysis machine or in a wheelchair en route to a doctor’s appointment.

She had lost one leg to amputation, was in danger or losing the other and suffered from advanced kidney disease.

With the holidays behind us, Americans are working on all-too-familiar New Year’s resolutions to hit the gym more or lose a few extra pounds. But what if the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and your boss helped make that happen?

Under a provision in the Affordable Care Act, businesses can now apply for help to get their workforce in better shape. The idea is to prevent and cut back the rates of common and costly chronic diseases.

It’s called the National Healthy Worksite Program and the CDC will select up to 100 businesses to participate.

I have been spending the last few reporting months with men and women in pressing need of comprehensive mental health services. Arguably, for their own safety, they should have an alternative -- the type of locked facilities that are no longer part of California's institutional landscape.

One man sees a bridge spanning a sun-splashed bay, and suicidal ideation, or threats of jumping off it, become part of the interview. Another offers detailed accounts of combat in Southeast Asia, but the Veteran's Administration finds nothing of the sort in service records that show a five-month stint ending with a medical discharge.

I have been spending the last few reporting months with men and women in pressing need of comprehensive mental health services. Arguably, for their own safety, they should have an alternative -- the type of locked facilities that are no longer part of California's institutional landscape.

One man sees a bridge spanning a sun-splashed bay, and suicidal ideation, or threats of jumping off it, become part of the interview. Another offers detailed accounts of combat in Southeast Asia, but the Veteran's Administration finds nothing of the sort in service records that show a five-month stint ending with a medical discharge.

Their stories will be part of an upcoming project that I won't detail here as we work to meet deadlines with our reporting partner.

Most of the mid-year budget cuts that Gov. Jerry Brown announced this week will take effect on Jan. 1.

But major reductions to In-Home Supportive Services won’t be among them. IHSS is a publicly financed program that helps some low-income elderly and disabled people receive care at home.

Disability Rights California already has filed a lawsuit challenging Brown’s proposal to reduce IHSS hours by 20 percent. Cutting the hours and eliminating funding for local anti-fraud measures would save the state $101.5 million.

“Dear Hospital Administrator,
 I had my baby at your hospital on 01-30-2010 and,
overall, I had a [sic] unacceptable experience.”

A mother wrote this with the help of The Letters Project, an online program that birth doula Tracy Hartley designed to help mothers and mothers-to-be exert greater control during the hospital births of their babies. (Read the full letter here.)

When I slice open a bag of baby spinach, I do exactly what millions of other Americans do. 

We dump the contents in a salad spinner. Flood the leaves with water.  Spin them dry with vigor, determined to protect family and friends from E. coli, salmonella or worse. 

Mindful of the drumbeat of recent recalls—salmonella on lettuce, listeria on Romaine—I might even soak my bagged greens, ignoring the bags’ “triple-washed” and “pre-washed” labels.

But one evening last week, I grudgingly poured bagged arugula straight into a salad bowl and ate it.

In this economy many people are feeling the pinch of paying copays for a doctor’s visit or prescription drugs, but for seniors these costs are hitting hard.

Around the country about one in six seniors are now living in poverty, according to new data released by the Census Bureau. That’s nearly double previous estimates and the largest increase for any group in the report. The main culprit: out-of-pocket medical costs.

Officials at Intermountain Healthcare are well aware of the growing move to standardize medical treatments and rein in differences in how doctors and hospitals practice medicine.

They’re the ones teaching other hospitals and health systems how to do it.

Intermountain, which operates 23 hospitals and 155 clinics in Utah and southern Idaho, has been a trailblazer in identifying and addressing excessive use of certain outdated or unnecessary procedures.

At first it seemed pretty improbable.

How could six, seven, eight different ethnic media outlets (some publishing in other languages) work together on one story? What one story would be compelling enough to interest them? And how would all the pieces fit together? That’s what was swirling around my mind when Julian Do, Southern California director of New America Media (NAM), quietly suggested to me at a reception on April 1 that the CHCF Center for Health Reporting could play a big role in coordinating just such an effort. I was intrigued by the prospect, but its looming complexities caused me to just file it away.

A 1994 California law required that hospital buildings meet strict standards so that their buildings can withstand major earthquakes.   

The law consists of two parts.  First, hospitals must fix or replace buildings with structural problems that could cause them to collapse in a quake.

Second, plumbing, electricity and other non-structural features must be sturdy enough that hospitals can keep operating after the quake.

The CHCF Center for Health Reporting is continuing to report on the fact that where you live can result in big differences in the kind of health care you receive.

Have you, a family member or someone you know had a surgery to prevent stroke, a procedure called carotid endarterectomy? What was your experience – did you have any negative side effects or complications?

This surgery removes plaque build up in the carotid artery to prevent stroke. It turns out – as is the case with elective heart procedures – the rate of use of carotid endarterectomies varies greatly around California. If this procedure is being overused it can have serious consequences for patients – the surgery can cause complications such as stroke, heart attack or death.

In the last few years it’s become more and more apparent that making changes to the health care system is a monumental task.

As protesters for and against the federal health care law took to Washington’s Capitol before the measure passed last year…to the heated GOP primary race debates calling for the repeal of the law today, many are left wondering if it’s politically possible for the government to help them avoid mounting medical bills.

But as it stands now, the Affordable Care Act has several provisions that consumer advocates say will help keep Californians out of debt:

When I started doing the reporting for our recently published series about Californians undergoing heart procedures at wildly different rates, depending on where they live, I discovered quickly that the use of elective angioplasty is still hotly debated in the medical world.

That’s because some experts believe it’s an overused – and often ineffective – way of treating stable coronary artery disease.

Angioplasty is a cardiac catheterization procedure intended to open blocked arteries that supply blood to the heart, usually with stents.

At a time when we keep hearing about how people still aren’t getting jobs and family budgets are tighter than ever, I started thinking about how these people are affording health care. Turns out last year 73 million Americans had trouble paying off their medical bills, according to The Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit health care research group.