[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Deborah Snow

The recent trend in California is the effort by consumer advocates to improve accountability in the State health care boards. Capitol Weekly on June 12 discussed Julia Fellmeth, the director of the Center of Public Interest Law, and her effort to change the way professional boards operate in California. “Fellmeth said her mission is simple: to put power in the hands of the public.” Fellmeth is also quoted in the article as saying “state boards have sought mainly to protect the professionals they are supposed to be monitoring instead of the public.”

Senator Ridley-Thomas, chair of the committee regulating business and professions, has continuously taken a proactive position in Board reform and has recently enacted several pieces of legislation that will provide necessary safeguards for the public. His Senate Bill 1141 would establish new standards for the oversight, testing and discipline of physicians and others in the medical profession who have substance abuse problems.

by WarmingLaw [courtesy of Calitics - Front Page]

(Cross-posted from Warming Law, which focuses on covering and analyzing the fight against global warming from a legal perspective. My name is Sean Siperstein, and I run Warming Law as part of my work for Community Rights Counsel, a non-profit, public interest law firm that assists communities in protecting their health and welfare. Given the blog's focus, a lot of what I write about ends up having to do with efforts by the administration and the auto industry to hold up California's pioneering efforts in fighting global warming (here's our full archive of posts about the EPA waiver application), and as such I'm (belatedly) taking up a suggestion to post select items here. Thanks for the opportunity to join the discussion; I really look forward to it!)

Reacting to last week's lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to produce a timely decision on California's waiver application to enforce its own auto emissions standards, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson cited-- as he had many times before-- the need to painstakingly evaluate thousands upon thousands of in-depth public comments on the waiver.