They may not speak English, understand Western medicine or have enough money to pay for medical insurance, let alone a $30 copay.
Some have what health advocates call “White Coat Syndrome” — they don’t want to go anywhere near doctors. In many cases, the aging immigrants who call Linda Vista home only trust a local community center, which is working to check on seniors at home.
Our story examines the challenges facing Linda Vista residents as they try to reach wellness.
In other news:
- The city of San Diego owes a bunch of new investors a bunch of new money. This year alone, the city has borrowed $1.7 billion from those willing to buy its bonds.
And that doesn’t include about $140 million in other loans. The city owes all this money plus interest.
But that’s not a bad thing, city officials say, especially since San Diego hasn’t been able to issue public bonds since 2004.
We take a look at where the money is going — a huge chunk is paying off previous loans — and how more openness is boosting the city’s prospects.
- San Diego schools have fallen into a much bigger financial hole than officials had anticipated. The school district expects to have to cut as much as $175 million from its 2010-2011 budget, the school board learned yesterday. And this year, it will need to cut more than $16 million because it had unexpected expenses.
When it comes to cuts, “the range of possibilities go from bad to catastrophic,” a district official said.
- Also on our site today: It’s attorney vs. attorney (not a bit like Spy vs. Spy, alas) in the battle over municipal outsourcing. Our Photo of the Day is a revealing shot of Chargers coach Norv Turner, definitely not a happy camper, from Monday night’s Chargers game. And our reporter Adrian Florido, whose job is to cover communities that have fallen under the media’s radar, reports from a conference on border issues in El Paso. He’d like your thoughts about uncovered border stories here and the questions he should be asking people there.
- Three sectors of the economy are responsible for almost 80 percent of the job losses in San Diego over the past three years. Can you guess what they are?
Our columnist Rich Toscano, who’s never met a number he couldn’t crunch, has the answer, which has everything to do with the housing bust.
- Elsewhere:
Local home foreclosures are down and defaults are up “as banks finetuned their approach to distressed properties,” and San Diego is cracking down on unsafe cabs. (U-T)
- The city of San Diego has filed suit in federal court, “asking for damages from the Navy, the San Diego Unified Port District, power companies and shipbuilders — many defunct —that operated in the shipyards along the 60-acre area south of Coronado Bridge during the last 100 years.” (CityBeat)
- CityBeat riffs on a labor leader’s use of a naughty word in a conversation with our reporter and attends a medical marijuana task force meeting and wonders why park signs in Pine Valley translate a warning about water-balloon use into Spanish (“no globos de agua”) but don’t do the same for one about mountain lions.
- Finally, a new survey says San Diego is the fifth most stressed of 25 American cities. (Chicago is No. 1.) I tried to find out how many San Diegans were surveyed and if they represented the diversity of the city, but there seemed to be no detailed information about the survey online.
I did look hard, though. Now I’m stressed.