Expand Medicaid for the 200,000 people who need health care, which will bring more money to our state.

We must stop the blockade. Medicaid expansion is the right thing to do.

Tulare County ranks third in pesticide use in California, with more than 14 million pounds of active ingredients used in 2012 (latest data available from California Dept. of Pesticide Regulation). Current protection against restricted material pesticides, the most dangerous type, only prohibits aerial application within a 1/4-mile of schools that are in session, labor camps, and neighborhoods. This leaves a loophole for dangerous pesticides to be used in close proximity to mentioned sites—if applied non-aerially. For this reason, farm working parents have begun to ask for stronger protection zones against restricted material pesticides. The research is there. There are studies that highlight the following among other potential harms: community susceptibility to pesticide in agricultural areas (1), the detrimental impacts of pesticides on kids’ health (2), and exposure to agricultural pesticides as not a good thing (3). Stronger protection is possible and realistic. With the signing of AB 947 in 2002, California agricultural commissioners were authorized to apply regulations to agricultural use of pesticides within a quarter-mile of a school. With this supportive legislation in place, protection around school sites can be a great start. On behalf of concerned families in Tulare County, we ask for your support to better protect the health of Tulare County children and communities by signing our petition to urge the Tulare County Ag Commissioner to include all applications of restricted material pesticides onto established quarter-mile protection around schools that are in session and other sensitive areas. 1. Quirós-Alcalá L, Bradman A, Nishioka M, Harnly ME, Hubbard A, McKone TE, Ferber J, Eskenazi B. "Pesticides in house dust from urban and farmworker households in California: an observational measurement study." Environ Health. 2011 Mar 16; 10:19.doi: 10.1186/1476-069X-10-19. 2. Schafer KS, Marquez EC, Chandra M, Hutchens K, Reeves M, 1. Watts M; Pesticide Action Network North America. "A generation in jeopardy: how pesticides are undermining our children’s health and intelligence." http://www.panna.org/sites/default/files/KidsHealthReportOct2012.pdf. Published October 2012. Accessed April 13, 2015. 3. Shelton JF, Geraghty EM, Tancredi DJ, Delwiche LD, Schmidt RJ, Ritz B, Hansen RL, Hertz-Picciotto I. 2014. "Neurodevelopmental disorders and prenatal residential proximity to agricultural pesticides: the CHARGE study." Environ Health Perspect 122:1103–1109; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/ehp.1307044.

Heroin is killing not only our town, but our state. We have very little affordable treatment for addicts and almost none of this treatment is available. The waiting lists are way too long, and our number of overdoses and deaths rise daily. This needs to change. The epidemic has gone too far for too long.

This is for the thousands of people who will die, needlessly, if Rick Scott is allowed to back track on his promise to expand Medicaid.

In July of 2014, 6-year-old Luz Vasquez ran out of the medication she needs for her asthma. Because she is insured by Medi-Cal, Luz had to wait for an appointment to see a doctor and renew her prescriptions. Nine months later, Luz is still waiting and unable to play outside like other children because of the risk of triggering a serious asthma attack. California’s Medi-Cal system is broken. Patients like Luz are unable to get the care they need, doctors actually lose money when they take in Medi-Cal patients, our state gets sicker, and we all pay for it with higher healthcare costs. Our state legislators can fix it. California pays one of the lowest rates in the nation for Medicaid services, known as Medi-Cal in California. We’re 47th in the country, behind states like Mississippi and Kentucky. In fact, California’s Medi-Cal program covers only about 50% of the cost of providing care. Medi-Cal rates have been repeatedly cut in recent years, but if legislators fully fund it, we can help protect patients like Luz. More than forty state legislators have already stepped up to support statewide legislation (AB 366 and SB 243) to fix the system by fully funding Medi-Cal. Sign the petition and urge your state legislators to join on.

I have been affected by this in many ways. I can't see doctors, and I can't afford the medication I need. In the long term, I fear my medical issues will only get worse. It's time to accept federal funds to help thousands of people like me across the state.

This petition is dedicated to all persons in need of health care assistance being brushed under the rug, discredited, ignored, neglected, suffering, stereotyped, harassed, misunderstood, and misrepresented.

With the legislative session drawing to a close soon, there isn't much time left for the governor to move forward the expansion plan with the legislature. If they fail to reach an agreement, thousands of Alaskans will suffer.

I work as an English as a Second Language Paraprofessional in a Title 1 school. I see the results of this issue every day, not only among the students but also among the non-professional, non-contract workers like me.

***I did NOT creat this article! It is a portion of the article called, "Why ban the sale of cigarettes? The case for abolition" by Robert N Proctor.*** The cigarette is the deadliest object in the history of human civilisation. Cigarettes kill about 6 million people every year, a number that will grow before it shrinks. Smoking in the twentieth century killed only 100 million people, whereas a billion could perish in our century unless we reverse course.1 Even if present rates of consumption drop steadily to zero by 2100, we will still have about 300 million tobacco deaths this century. The cigarette is also a defective product, meaning not just dangerous but unreasonably dangerous, killing half its long-term users. And addictive by design. It is fully within the power of the Food and Drug Administration in the US, for instance, to require that the nicotine in cigarettes be reduced to subcompensable, subaddictive levels.2 ,3 This is not hard from a manufacturing point of view: the nicotine alkaloid is water soluble, and denicotinised cigarettes were already being made in the 19th century.4 Philip Morris in the 1980s set up an entire factory to make its Next brand cigarettes, using supercritical fluid extraction techniques to achieve a 97% reduction in nicotine content, which is what would be required for a 0.1% nicotine cigarette, down from present values of about 2%.5 Keep in mind that we're talking about nicotine content in the rod as opposed to deliveries measured by the ‘FTC method’, which cannot capture how people actually smoke.5 Cigarettes are also defective because they have been engineered to produce an inhalable smoke. Tobacco smoke was rarely inhaled prior to the nineteenth century; it was too harsh, too alkaline. Smoke first became inhalable with the invention of flue curing, a technique by which the tobacco leaf is heated during fermentation, preserving the sugars naturally present in the unprocessed leaf. Sugars when they burn produce acids, which lower the pH of the resulting smoke, making it less harsh, more inhalable. There is a certain irony here, since these ‘milder’ cigarettes were actually far more deadly, allowing smoke to be drawn deep into the lungs. The world's present epidemic of lung cancer is almost entirely due to the use of low pH flue-cured tobacco in cigarettes, an industry-wide practice that could be reversed at any time. Regulatory agencies should mandate a significant reduction in rod-content nicotine, but they should also require that no cigarette be sold with a smoke pH lower than 8. Those two mandates alone would do more for public health than any previous law in history.5 Death and product defect are two reasons to abolish the sale of cigarettes, but there are others. A third is the financial burden on public and private treasuries, principally from the costs of treating illnesses due to smoking. Cigarette use also results in financial losses from diminished labor productivity, and in many parts of the world makes the poor even poorer.6 A fourth reason is that the cigarette industry is a powerful corrupting force in human civilisation. Big tobacco has corrupted science by sponsoring ‘decoy’ or ‘distraction research’,5 but it has also corrupted popular media, insofar as newspapers and magazines dependent on tobacco advertising for revenues have been reluctant to publish critiques of cigarettes.7 The industry has corrupted even the information environment of its own workforce, as when Philip Morris paid its insurance provider (CIGNA) to censor the health information sent to corporate employees.8Tobacco companies have bullied, corrupted or exploited countless other institutions: the American Medical Association, the American Law Institute, sports organisations, fire-fighting bodies, Hollywood, the US Congress—even the US presidency and US military. President Lyndon Johnson refused to endorse the 1964 Surgeon General's report, for instance, fearing alienation of the tobacco-friendly South. Cigarette makers managed even to thwart the US Navy's efforts to go smoke-free. In 1986, the Navy had announced a goal of creating a smoke-free Navy by the year 2000; tobacco-friendly congressmen were pressured to thwart that plan, and a law was passed requiring that all ships sell cigarettes and allow smoking. The result: American submarines were not smoke-free until 2011.9 Cigarettes are also, though, a significant cause of harm to the natural environment. Cigarette manufacturing consumes scarce resources in growing, curing, rolling, flavouring, packaging, transport, advertising and legal defence, but also causes harms from massive pesticide use and deforestation. Many Manhattans of savannah woodlands are lost every year to obtain the charcoal used for flue curing. Cigarette manufacturing also produces non-trivial greenhouse gas emissions, principally from the fossil fuels used for curing and transport, fires from careless disposal of butts, and increased medical costs from maladies caused by smoking5 (China produces 40 percent of the world's cigarettes, for example, and uses mainly coal to cure its tobacco leaf). And cigarette makers have provided substantial funding and institutional support for global climate change deniers, causing further harm.10 Cigarettes are not sustainable in a world of global warming; indeed they are one of its overlooked and easily preventable causes. But the sixth and most important reason for abolition is the fact that smokers themselves do not like their habit. This is a key point: smoking is not a recreational drug; most smokers do not like the fact they smoke and wish they could quit. This means that cigarettes are very different from alcohol or even marijuana. Only about 10–15% of people who drink liquor ever become alcoholics, versus addiction rates of 80% or 90% for people who smoke.11 As an influential Canadian tobacco executive once confessed: smoking is not like drinking, it is rather like being an alcoholic.12 Sourc...

Petition Update 9/18: ----- Ben Barnes from The Office of Policy & Managment announced today that DDS will receive more than $7.5 million in rescission cuts. Last Sunday the Hartford Courant released an article identifying $48 million in massive overspending on overtime at DDS. Despite this, once again, the administration has chosen to target cuts in a way that disproportionately affects families in need, while barely addressing waste, mismanagement and overtime at DDS. Here is the article: http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/hc-state-overtime-costs-soar-0913-20150913-story.html Contact Governor Malloy at 1-800-406-1527 today and every day until these cuts are restored. This is not negotiable. Breakdown of DDS Cuts: Employment Opportunities and Day Services - $3,000,000 Community Residential Services - $1,800,000 Voluntary Service - $297,312 Personal Services - $1,500,000 Other Expenses - $206,194 Cooperative Placements Program - $613,621 Supplemental Payments for Medical Services - $150,000 More information to follow. ============================================ My name is Michelle Rivelli and I am the mother of Jessica, who has autism and intellectual disabilities. I am also a pediatrician in Shelton. I ask you to sign this petition about the current state of the DDS budget cuts. I know many of you have written letters and been up to the legislature, but for those of you who have not had the opportunity to do so, I wanted to provide you with the current state of the budget cuts and what your options are at this time. There have been enormous cuts to DDS, this year being the most profound and far reaching. For the first time, day program funding for 2016-2017 grads is totally eliminated, VSP is cut 60% and residential/home supports are drastically cut. The only funding preserved is for personal services (i.e. for DDS employees, which in reality over 90% of this will go to state employees at Southbury Training School and the other DDS regional centers). Unless the three line items highlighted above get added back into the budget, our children will have to stay home after they graduate at age 21 years! Additionally, any other supports families have been receiving will be significantly cut. There will be no hope of any residential services until the death of both parents or other profound crisis. The only hope we have is to contact the legislators on the health subcommittee of appropriations to let them know how this will affect our families before April 30th when they make their recommendations. In addition to this petition, contacting the leadership of appropriations will be helpful once the budget gets to the main appropriations committee in May. Unfortunately the only thing that seems to have influence in this process is the number of individuals who contact legislators about specific issues. I am listing the names and contact information for the subcommittee and leadership in Hartford. Your first contact should be your own state senator and representative. You can find them on the www.cga.ct.gov website. There is additional information on the cga website and on the ARC of CT website about how to contact legislators. Then if you have time, contact the individuals below. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Some of the legislators have to be contacted through their specific websites rather than via regular e-mail. I totally understand that none of us have time to do this when we are trying to keep things together with our kids at home. However, after meeting with numerous legislators and advocacy groups, these contacts are the only way to ensure our children have a safety net going forward. We do have strength in numbers. Sign this petition to have a voice to protect our special needs children! Feel free to send a letter/call/Email: CO-CHAIRPERSONS of health subcommittee of appropriations (note **=members of ID/DD caucus), **Sen. Terry Gerratana (D-S6) Room 3002, LOB (860)240-0584 [email protected] Rep. Patricia Dillon (D-92) Room 4019, LOB (860) 240-8585 [email protected] MEMBERS: for all of the Republicans you need to go on their websites to e-mail, for the democrats use the formula--- [email protected] **Sen. Paul Formica (R-S20) Room 3901, LOB (860) 240-0574 **Rep. Whit Betts (R-78) Room 4200, LOB (860) 240-8700 **Rep. Catherine Abercrombie (D-83) Room 2002, LOB (860) 240-0492 **Rep. Kevin Ryan (D-139) Room 4108, LOB (860) 240-8585 Rep. Andre Baker, Jr. (D-124) Room 5008, LOB (860) 240-8585 **Rep. Peter Tercyak (D-26) Room 3804, LOB (860) 240-8585 Rep. Juan Candelaria (D-95) Room 1804, LOB (860) 240-8585 **Rep. Mitch Bolinsky (R-106) Room 4053, LOB (860) 240-8700 **Rep. Susan Johnson (D-49) Room 5007, LOB (860) 240-8585 **Rep. Jay Case (R-63) Room 2004, LOB (860) 240-8700 Rep. Robyn Porter (D-94) Room 2704, LOB (860) 240-8585 **Rep. Kathleen McCarty (R-38) Room 4046, LOB (860) 240-8700 LEADERSHIP OF APPROPRIATIONS-Co-chairs: **Senator Beth Bye, Deputy Majority Leader(D5)1-800-842-1420, need to e-mail via link on her website Representative Toni Walker, (D-93) , 1-800-842-8267 [email protected] LEADERSHIP OF LEGISLATURE: Senate President Martin Looney, (D-11), (800)-842-1420, must go on website to e-mail Senator Bob Duff, Senate Majority Leader (D-25), (800)-842-1420, [email protected] Rep. Joe Aresimowic, House Majority Leader (D-30), (860) 240-8489 [email protected] Rep. Brendan Sharkey, Speaker of the House (D-88),1-800-842-1902, [email protected] DR. RIVELLI'S LETTER TO STATE LEGISLATORS: The developmental disability community is currently experiencing a crisis due to unprecedented cuts to essential DDS services and slashing of funds to all other critical services. I know this because as a pediatrician I am seeing my patients affected. Closer to home, as the parent of a 20 year old with autism and intellectual...