Angela Hart

San Francisco police officers instruct an unhoused person to move personal items that are blocking the sidewalk on Cedar Street in San Francisco on Nov. 15, 2024. Photo by Jungho Kim for CalMatters

Trump turns homelessness response away from housing, toward forced treatment

March 28, 2025 at 11:03 a.m.

President Donald Trump is vowing a new approach to getting homeless people off the streets by forcibly moving those living outside into large camps while mandating mental health and addiction...

Supreme Court OKs local crackdown on homeless, advocates cry chaos

July 3, 2024 at 6:00 a.m.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s watershed decision on homelessness Friday will make it easier for elected officials and law enforcement authorities nationwide to fine and arrest people who live on streets.

Alondra Mercado (left), a community health worker, visits Fabiola Sandoval’s home in Turlock, California, to teach her about in-home asthma triggers and to monitor the progress of the asthma services provided by the state’s Medicaid program. (Angela Hart/KFF Health News)

Newsom’s $12 billion Medicaid makeover banks on nonprofits’ buy-in

May 15, 2024 at 6:04 a.m.

For much of his young life, Jorge Sanchez regularly gasped for air, at times coughing so violently that he’d almost throw up. His mother whisked him to the emergency room...

Gov. Gavin Newsom touts record jobs creation. (ANGELA HART/KFF HEALTH NEWS)

California voters are skeptical that more money is the answer to homelessness

March 12, 2024 at 12:30 p.m.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s expensive ballot-box attempt to tackle the mental health and addiction crisis on the state’s streets is leading by a razor-thin margin, a week after the March...

Nurse Anna Cummings prepares an injection while Keri Weinstock, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, speaks with patient Linda Wood, who is homeless. Last year, the federal government began allowing insurers to pay for care delivered outside hospitals and clinics, expanding funding for street medicine teams that treat homeless patients. (ANGELA HART/KFF HEALTH NEWS)

California Gov. Newsom wants voters to approve billions more to help the homeless. Will it help?

February 28, 2024 at 6:16 a.m.

California voters will decide March 5 whether to pump billions more dollars into combating the nation’s worst homelessness crisis, an investment Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom argues will finally provide the...

California is going the biggest, pumping $12 billion into an ambitious Medicaid initiative largely to help homeless patients find housing, pay for it, and avoid eviction. (Moment/ Getty Images)

Is housing health care? State Medicaid programs increasingly say ‘yes’

February 8, 2024 at 11:28 a.m.

States are plowing billions of dollars into a high-stakes health care experiment that’s exploding around the country: using scarce public health insurance money to provide housing for the poorest and...

Health care ‘game-changer’? Feds boost care for homeless Americans

October 19, 2023 at 1:58 p.m.

The Biden administration is making it easier for doctors and nurses to treat homeless people wherever they find them, from creekside encampments to freeway underpasses, marking a fundamental shift in...

The cost of services and therapies, and their ability to pay worries older adults most. (Photo by Anne Wernikoff for CalMatters)

Covered California to cut patient costs after Democratic lawmakers win funding from Gov. Newsom

July 27, 2023 at 1:55 p.m.

Weeks after Democratic lawmakers forced Gov. Gavin Newsom to make good on a four-year-old pledge to use tax penalty proceeds from fining the uninsured to increase health insurance subsidies for...

‘He Stood His Ground’: State Senator Will Leave Office as Champion of Tough Vaccine Laws

September 6, 2022 at 6:27 a.m.

A California lawmaker who rose to national prominence by muscling through some of the country’s strongest vaccination laws is leaving the state legislature later this year after a momentous tenure...

California’s public health tax is dead for the year

July 15, 2022 at 12:55 p.m.

A ballot initiative that would have raised taxes on California millionaires and billionaires to fund public health programs and pandemic prevention is dead — at least for this year.

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