legislation

SACRAMENTO — California lawmakers on Monday approved a one-time infusion of $90 million for Planned Parenthood and other women’s health clinics, a direct respond to the Trump administration’s cuts to reproductive healthcare and access to abortion providers.

“Trump is tearing down healthcare and increasing costs,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas (D-Hollister) said in a statement. “Democrats are building it up — investing millions in women’s health and maternal care, because families come first in California.”

The legislation providing the funding, SB 106, carried by Sen. John Laird (D-Santa Cruz), is intended to help offset the losses from federal cuts that targeted abortion providers. The Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed last year by President Trump, prohibited federal Medicaid funding from going to Planned Parenthood.

The bill now heads to Gov. Gavin Newsom.

California and a coalition of other Democrat-led states filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration last year over the provision. More than 80% of the nearly 1.3 million annual patient visits to Planned Parenthood in California previously were reimbursed by Medi-Cal, the state’s version of Medicaid, which provides healthcare coverage to low-income Americans.

Assemblyman David Tangipa (R-Clovis) voiced opposition to the legislation Monday.

“Why does Planned Parenthood get a $90-million grant when right now over 60 hospitals in the state of California are on the verge of shutting down?” Tangipa asked, speaking on the Assembly floor. “Hospitals across our state that deliver high quality care to women are on the brink of closure.”

Planned Parenthood offers a range of services, including abortions, birth control and cancer screenings.

California’s ticketing industry could be undergoing some major changes.

On Thursday, state Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) introduced a new bill, the California Fans First Act, that would impose price caps on tickets sold in the resale market, limiting prices to no more than 10% above the ticket’s face value.

By making it illegal to sell overly expensive tickets, AB 1720 is aimed at making resale tickets more affordable for fans. If the legislation becomes law, it would apply only to shows in California and exclude tickets to sporting events.

AB 1720 was introduced weeks after a similar bill, AB 1349, reached the California Senate. The latter aims to ban speculative ticket sales (tickets that resellers don’t yet possess) in the state. If enacted, the proposed legislation would require sellers to have event tickets in their possession before listing them for sale and would raise the maximum civil penalty for each violation from $2,500 to $10,000.

Both bills aim to better regulate the state’s resale ticketing market.

Over the last several years, high ticket prices have been a recurring complaint among concertgoers. Rising demand for tickets has spurred a secondary resale marketplace for all kinds of high-profile live events, including music tours and sports games, making it harder to get tickets on the primary market.

Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation have been at the center of this issue for years, as the major ticketing vendor sells around 80% of tickets through its website. The company is currently facing lawsuits from both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging monopolistic practices and illegal ticket vendor practices.

“We’re trying to convince the federal government and state governments to get on the same page of recognizing where the problem is, which is overwhelmingly in the resale industry, and trying to do something about it,” said Dan Wall, Live Nation’s vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, in a previous interview with The Times.

In a statement, Live Nation said it supports “efforts to protect concert fans and artists” and that the latest bill “targets a core problem in live music: predatory resale sites.”

Similar legislation has been popping up nationwide and around the world — the U.K. recently announced plans to ban the resale of tickets for prices higher than their face value.

A resale cap was successfully passed in Maine last year, with tickets only allowed to be sold at 110% of the ticket’s original price. Other states like New York, Vermont, Washington and Tennessee are also considering ticketing regulations.

Some critics see this surge of ticketing legislation as a way to distract from Ticketmaster/Live Nation’s legal troubles and single out the resale market.

Diana Moss, the director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, said that by capping resale ticket prices, AB 1720 “puts consumers last, not first.”

“It buys into the false narrative that the secondary market is to blame for all problems in ticketing, deflecting attention from the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly,” said Moss in a statement to The Times. “Caps will decimate resale, the only market with competition, and hand Live Nation even more power to jack up ticket fees.”