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 Provided by ReachMD
PAs and Politics: Karen Bass Makes a Bid for Congress
on Partners in Practice
Karen Bass began her career in the 1980s as a PA working in the nation's largest trauma center at the Los Angeles County/USC Medical Center, but away from the ED she had a passion for politics. Today she is the former speaker of the California Assembly and the democratic nominee for the 33rd congressional district in California. Speaker Emeritus Bass joins host Lisa Dandrea Lenell to discuss how her career in healthcare shaped and influenced her career in politics, and the changes she would like to bring to the physician assistant profession if she's elected to Congress in November.
 Lisa Dandrea Lenell is a physician assistant and the director of operations for an internal medicine practice in Illinois. She is passionate about bringing physician assistant and nurse practitioner issues into the spotlight, focusing on awareness and understanding of the professions.Mrs. Lenell is a graduate of the Physician Assistant Program at Midwestern University in Downers Grove, Illinois. She has continued her relationship with Midwestern University, working as adjunct faculty.She has published in the prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal Dermatologic Surgery and has been featured in several professional journals.
Karen Bass Bass worked for nearly a decade as a physician assistant and was as a clinical instructor at the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine's physician assistant program. She made history in 2004 when the California Assembly elected its 67th Speaker, making her the first African American woman in the country to serve in this role.Since taking office, Ms. Bass has been delivering change and delivering results to her constituents in Los Angeles and the people of California by jumpstarting infrastructure projects to create new jobs in the state. Ms. Bass has also championed efforts to provide quality healthcare to Californians and expand opportunities for California's youth.Speaker Emeritus Bass has authored legislation that expands Healthy Families Insurance coverage to prevent children from going without health care. Her legislation also includes bills to reform schools and improve conditions and services for youth. She also continues to be an advocate for foster children and she has carried several bills to support programs and funding to ensure foster youth have better chances for success including legislation that uses federal funds to extend support to California's foster youth to the age of 21 as well as legislation that helps California draw down a share of federal family connection grants. These grants have a proven record of placing foster kids in the healthy, stable care of relatives and decreasing the number of youth in California's foster care system from 120,000 to 65,000 in the past decade.And although she's been in public office for five years, she has served the public for decades. Among other projects, in 1990, she founded Community Coalition, a community-based social justice organization in South Los Angeles, where she was the executive director for 14 years.
ReachMD, an innovative communications company, provides thought-provoking medical news and information to healthcare practitioners. Established to help increasingly time-constrained medical providers stay abreast of new research, treatment protocols and continuing education requirements, ReachMD delivers innovative and informative radio programming via XM Satellite Radio Channel 160 and online streaming developed by healthcare professionals for healthcare professionals.
The viewpoint expressed in this article is the opinion of the author and is not necessarily the viewpoint of the owners or employees at Healthcare Staffing Innovations, LLC.
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