Roundup: Iowa lawmaker urges waiting on exchange bill until court rules; Calif. group finds way to recycle medicine

California Healthline: Organizing The Mental Health Of California
Assembly member Wesley Chesbro (D-Arcata) is nothing if not optimistic. But at last week's Assembly hearing on mental health issues, even he was having a little trouble trying to make lemonade of the budget cuts to mental health services. "We have gotten to the point where we're cutting things that were originally designed to save costs," Chesbro said of one particular mental health-related program, the caregiver resource centers (Gorn, 3/1).

California Healthline: HITEC-LA Bridges Gap Between Physicians, Technology
HITEC-LA, a federally designated Health Information Technology Regional Extension Center in Los Angeles County, is almost finished with the first phase of its federally subsidized mission to get 3,000 health care providers to use electronic health records. ... The center is a project of L.A. Care Health Plan, the nation's largest public health plan serving almost 800,000 L.A. County residents (Stephens, 3/1).

California Watch: State Court To Examine 'Pay-For-Delay' Deals By Drugmakers
California is the first state to examine whether pharmaceutical companies can pay competitors to not make or sell cheaper generic versions of their prescription drugs. The California Supreme Court last month agreed to review a 10-year-old class-action lawsuit involving the antibiotic Cipro (ciprofloxacin), which originally was manufactured by drugmaker Bayer (Yeung, 3/2). 

Mississippi Public Broadcasting: Half of All Mississippi Kids Could Soon Be On Medicaid or CHIP
New research shows that the recent health care overhaul could mean a growing number of Mississippi kids will get their health insurance through the government. ... Currently more than 60-thousand Medicaid eligible Mississippi kids are not on the program (Hess, 3/1).