Recent News

The Supreme Court's recent blessing of Obamacare has precipitated a rush among the nation's biggest health insurers to consolidate into two or three behemoths. The result will be good for their shareholders and executives, but bad for the rest of us -- who will pay through the nose for the health insurance we need. We have another choice, but before I get to it let me give you some background. Last week, Aetna announced it would spend $35 billion…

“We are proud of the charge San Francisco led to ensure marriage equality for all Americans," says Carmen Chu (MPP '03), San Francisco's Assessor-Recorder. "The movement was ignited in 2004 when we took the bold step to recognize same sex marriages. When California lifted the stay and resumed same sex marriages in 2013, I was proud to lead the way as the only County Recorder’s Office to remain open over the weekend so that loving couples did not have…

The Goldman School welcomes twenty-five leaders from Africa this summer as part of the Obama Administration’s Young African Leaders Initiative’s Mandela Fellowship Program. The highly selective US State Department program chooses 500 promising and accomplished fellows from among tens of thousands of applicants and sends them in cohorts of 25 to universities through the US. President Barack Obama launched the program at the University of Johannesburg in 2013. “We’re launching a new program that’s…

Photos by: Jonathan Fong The federal food stamps program known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) faces an uncertain political and budgetary future. Professor Hilary Hoynes, in partnership with the Berkeley Food Institute, convened a day-long, interdisciplinary workshop of policy makers, community leaders and academics to engage the critical quesitons around this important safety net program. "The objective was to have a structured conversation about SNAP with those who work most closely with it,” says Professor Hoynes, who…

Thursday, June 18, Pope Fran­cis released his long-​​awaited encycli­cal on the envi­ron­ment, a ground­break­ing let­ter declar­ing cli­mate change one of humanity’s great­est chal­lenges. Dr. Dan Kam­men, a 2007 Nobel Peace Prize win­ner who also serves as a Senior Fel­low to the Energy and Cli­mate Part­ner­ship…

The recent attack on the Marine Corps as "unwelcome intruders" is just the latest example of Berkeley politicians behaving badly. Showered with ridicule, confronted with the loss of federal and state money, the City Council was obliged to withdraw its misbegotten resolution, though it wasn't prepared to apologize for its blunder. "To err is human, but to really screw up it takes theBerkeley City Council," one councilmember ruefully acknowledged. But ask Standard & Poor's, the financial services company,…

A New York Times exposé last month revealed that nail salon workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, are paid below minimum wage, deprived of back pay and exposed to dangerous chemicals that pose serious health hazards. New York is now taking action against nail salons that exploit their employees. This issue mirrors a broader pattern nationwide. More than 11 million undocumented immigrants toil in America’s fields, construction sites, salons and fast-food…

There is new evidence that California’s Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) are growing in size and number, serving more patients, and improving quality of care. Some of the key findings from an analysis done by the Berkeley Healthcare Forum group in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley shed light on the positive developments in California’s ACOs. ACOs are moving the state toward achieving the goal of 60 percent of the population receiving integrated…

In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that the children of illegal immigrants cannot be denied a free public education. It’s not their fault, after all, that their parents brought them into this country. But until recently, 20 school districts in New York State effectively kept undocumented youngsters out of school by imposing bureaucratic roadblocks such as insisting that the students’ parents produce Social Security cards. It took a full-court press by the State Education Department and the state attorney…

This article is the fifth in a series exploring the effects that unconscious racial biases have on the criminal justice system in the United States. The science is clear that unconscious—or “implicit”—biases contribute to racial disparities in law enforcement outcomes, influencing everything from who is stopped by police (black more than whites), and what happens to them during those stops, to the severity of their sentences if convicted. Most relevant,…