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Monica Lam/California Watch Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding 

A former Redding hospital patient has sued the Prime Healthcare Services chain for disclosing her medical files to hundreds of people without permission.

In a lawsuit filed last month in Shasta County Superior Court, Darlene Courtois, a retired teacher's aide, accused Prime of repeatedly violating patient confidentiality laws in a frantic effort to discredit a 2011 California Watch news report about the hospital chain’s billing practices.

As part of that effort, the CEO at Prime’s Shasta Regional Medical Center sent emails to all of the hospital’s 785 employees disclosing details of the then-64-year-old diabetes patient’s confidential files, the lawsuit says.

The CEO also showed her medical files to the editor of the local newspaper in a successful effort to dissuade him from publishing the story, the suit says.

California Watch had interviewed Courtois for a story about a reported outbreak of a rare form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor at the Redding hospital...

Nick Ut/Associated Press Los Angeles police Sgt. Frank Preciado and Officer Wendy Reyes watch children arriving at Main Street Elementary School. 

As the White House considers proposals to allocate federal money for armed guards in schools, prominent school discipline reform groups have issued a report denouncing the idea as a misguided reaction to the school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

“Placing more police in schools has significant and harmful unintended consequences for young people that must be considered before agreeing to any proposal that would increase the presence of law enforcement in schools,” says an issue brief [PDF] released Friday by the Advancement Project, Dignity in Schools and other organizations.

The Advancement Project, founded in 1999, has offices in Washington, D.C., and California and has worked with school districts and states to adopt alternatives to suspensions and expulsions. Dignity in Schools also is devoted to working with districts and advocating fewer suspensions and less involvement of law enforcement in school...

There is, in fact, a vigorous debate over medical intervention in birth, and not just between the fringe and the medical establishment, but within the establishment. No one is suggesting that we revert to the practices of the 1900s, but many clinicians and scientists are warning that the medicalization of birth has gone too far. When I took a closer look at the data, I found one seemingly impossible statistic after another. Progress in reducing the infant mortality rate had advanced through the 20th century, but had stalled in the 21st century. This plateau, "has generated concern among researchers and policy makers," according to a 2008 brief from the National Center for Health Statistics. "The U.S. infant mortality rate is higher than those in most other developed countries," wrote the statisticians, "and the gap between the U.S. infant mortality rate and the rates for the countries with the lowest infant mortality [Japan, Sweden, Spain, and others] appears to be widening." In addition, the numbers of preterm and low birth-weight infants had actually risen (a part of this increase was due to a higher number of twins and multiples, perhaps from the rise of fertility treatments, but the increase remained when researchers only looked at singleton births)...

Michael Short/California Watch St. Andrew Missionary Baptist Church and private school in West Oakland 

The Oakland Unified School District failed to follow federal regulations in doling out taxpayer money to benefit local private schools and must pay some of it back, a state review has found.

The state Department of Education cited Oakland Unified for not meeting federal requirements in its distribution of federal Title I and Title II money to provide teacher training and tutoring for struggling students at private schools. Private schools are entitled to a share of federal money, but public school districts are responsible for maintaining control of the funds.

The state found that Oakland Unified paid instructors who were not independent of their private schools, shipped materials directly to the private schools without taking an inventory and let private schools design their own taxpayer-funded programs...

Monica Lam/California Watch

After billing Medicare for treating more than 1,100 cases of a rare affliction, a Prime Healthcare Services hospital in Redding abruptly stopped last year, state health records show. The change occurred soon after California Watch published a story about aggressive billing practices at the hospital.

About six months after it took control of the Shasta Regional Medical Center in Redding in late 2008, Prime began billing Medicare for treating senior citizens it diagnosed with kwashiorkor, a dangerous nutritional disorder usually seen among children during famines in developing countries. At its height, the hospital's billing for the malady surged to nearly 70 times the state average.

The previous high rates of kwashiorkor diagnoses made the hospital eligible for about $6,000 in Medicare bonus payments for each of the more than 1,100 cases of kwashiorkor it reported over a two-year period, according to federal records. That’s $6.9 million in all.

Prime said in a statement that its Medicare billings are legal and accurate. It declined to respond to follow-up questions...

Anaheim is the home to one of the most well-known and popular amusement parks in the world: Disneyland. It's also the home to a community whose anger at local police has boiled over recently, spilling onto the streets of Anaheim.

Watch Al-Jazeera English's video "Fault Lines," which, in its words, "examines the underlying causes of the recent unrest in Anaheim."

This video was featured on The I Files, the first YouTube investigative news channel, curated by the Center for Investigative Reporting, California Watch's parent company.

Boris Bartels/Flickr

Medicare may have overpaid an estimated $424 million to PacifiCare of California’s Medicare Advantage plan based on risk assessments that in many cases made patients seem sicker than they were, according to a federal oversight agency.

Medicare Advantage plans send patient diagnosis codes to Medicare, which boosts plan rates if clients are affected by serious medical conditions.

A new report by the U.S. Health and Human Services inspector general says PacifiCare was paid extra for treating patients with cancer or a dangerous bloodstream infection even though medical records didn’t describe those ailments.

UnitedHealth Group, which now owns PacifiCare of California, disputed the inspector general’s findings, saying the review of 100 cases could not be generalized to hundreds of other claims.

“The audit does not follow Medicare’s own guidelines, standards or accepted methodology for validating risk-adjustment payments,” a statement by UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement says. “In fact, it differs significantly from (Medicare’s) adopted methodology. The OIG appears to have relied instead on...

Mike Kepka/San Francisco Chronicle The Sonoma Developmental Center in Eldridge is one of five state-run institutions for the developmentally disabled. 

The state's largest board-and-care center for the severely disabled lost its primary license to operate today, after repeatedly exposing patients to abuse and shoddy medical care.

State regulators cited the Sonoma Developmental Center, which houses more than 500 patients, for dozens of cases where patients were put at risk of injury or death. In issuing the citations, the state moved to shut down a major portion of the century-old institution...

The 621st Contingency Response Wing/Flickr

An estimated 1 in 4 jobs in San Diego County are tied to the military sector, and $32 billion in defense-related activities is linked to that area alone, more than the entire economic output of Panama.  

So what happens if tens of billions of dollars in defense spending is suddenly yanked? Defense contractors and other employers are worrying aloud about the answer as Congress and President Barack Obama quarrel over tax increases and budget cuts and the country edges closer to the so-called fiscal cliff.

The bureaucratic term for this doomsday scenario is sequestration, and while many have expected a smaller military, more profound downsizing has a lot of people nervous in California and elsewhere.

“The damage is already starting to happen,” said Chad Moutray, chief economist for the National Association of Manufacturers. “Many of our members are already seeing a slowdown in their sales, hiring and investment.”

Deep spending reductions were proposed last year as a way to force lawmakers and the president to address the federal government’s outsized budget deficit. If Congress and the White House take no action by Jan. 2, $500 billion in Defense Department cuts will automatically kick in over the next 10 years, with $55 billion of it expected in the...