Daily Business Report: Tuesday, April 8, 2025
Newsom touts career master plan as his governorship begins to wind down
By Dan Walters| CalMatters
When Jerry Brown began his first governorship 50 years ago, he staffed his new administration with social and economic reform activists from left-of-center organizations.
One was the late Jim Lorenz, a founder of California Rural Legal Assistance, which was allied with United Farm Workers Union’s efforts to unionize field hands. Brown made Lorenz director of the Employment Development Department and directed him to devise a plan that would improve the lives of California’s poor, then as now a major segment of its population.
Lorenz eagerly complied, drafting a plan that would emulate, at least in some degree, the share-the-wealth policies of Scandinavia and other western European nations. The draft was leaked to the Oakland Tribune, then a very conservative newspaper which described it in a front-page headline as “Brown’s secret worker state,” implying incipient socialism.
Bill to Expand Telehealth Options for California Cancer Patients Passes Senate Committee
Evan Symon | California Globe
A bill to expand health access for cancer patients by allowing cancer patients in California to access out of state doctors remotely, passed the Senate Business, Professions & Economic Development Committee in a unanimous vote on Monday, giving a strong indication of overall bill passage later this year.
Senate Bill 508, authored by Senator Suzette Valladares (R-Santa Clarita), would expand the life-threatening disease requirement of an eligible patient to include a person who has been diagnosed with any stage of cancer and would provide that cancer patients are not subject to the clinical trial requirement. Specifically, it would allow all cancer patients to consult with out-of-state physicians through telehealth platforms, expanding from the current state law where telehealth visits are restricted to only in-state doctors and health professionals, with exceptions only for those with terminal illness or who are a part of clinical trials.
In an amendment added last week, the bill was slightly altered to expand the definition of an eligible patient from one who has been diagnosed just with cancer to “a patient whose immediately life-threatening disease or condition is in remission and the patient is continuing care with the previously established eligible out-of-state physician and surgeon.”
Canadians pull back on travel to California because of Trump: ‘I will miss the desert’
By Carolyn Jones | CalMatters
California tourism could lose billions of dollars because of President Donald Trump’s policies on tariffs, immigration and gender identity, as well as his talk of annexing Canada.
Visit California, a nonprofit organization that promotes tourism in the Golden State, recently revised its overall visitor spending forecast for this year from $166 billion to $160 billion, saying international travel into California is already beginning to slow. Canada, the second-largest source of international tourism dollars for the state after Mexico, accounted for $3.7 billion of the $26.5 billion foreign travel brought into the state last year, Visit California said.
So it could be a big problem for California that many Canadians are angry about tariffs and Trump’s insistence that their country should become the 51st U.S. state. Many are refusing to buy U.S.-made products and don’t want to cross the border. Canada and other countries have also issued advisories for travel to the United States, warning travelers that they risk being detained, or that because of the Trump’s administration’s policies on transgender people there could be complications for them depending on what gender is shown on their passports.
