The Brief

On an overcast morning in July, marine biologist Greg Rouse knelt next to a large tide pool near La Jolla’s Bird Rock.

“This place is incredibly diverse in habitats,” Rouse said, scooping a sample of seawater into a plastic bag.

A few miles down the beach, in his seaside lab at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, Rouse separated the sampled water into a petri dish.

At first glance it was just water and some floating ocean debris.

But when Rouse slid the petri dish under a microscope, hundreds of nearly-microscopic animals burst into life on a high-resolution monitor: shrimps and snails, pillbug-like isopods, worms of all sorts of different shapes, and at least one bright-orange sea slug.

Sampling tide pools like this is fairly routine for Rouse, but lately, it has been part of something bigger. Rouse is leading the first phase of an effort to document California’s intertidal ecosystems.

That means logging every organism found in the tidal seawater, sand and rocks from San Diego to the Oregon border over the next two years.

“It's a baseline of what is here right now,” Rouse said. “It's a shame we didn't do this 20 or 40 years ago. But in those times, we didn't really have the DNA technology and the cost efficiency that we have these days.”

The project, called the California Intertidal Biodiversity DNA Barcode Library project, is ambitious. Nothing of this scale has been attempted in the U.S. It’s being led by a coalition of top research institutions, including Scripps, the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, the California Ocean Protection Council and the Southern California Coastal Research Project.

The goal is to create a comprehensive picture of California’s tidal habitats by focusing on the algae and invertebrates that live in them, including their DNA profiles. Scientists say that will let them more effectively track changes in those ecosystems.

Scientists building the biological library are focused on the nearly microscopic invertebrates and algae that live in California's tidal regions, which are less well understood than more visible fish, birds and mammals.

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Lucas Brady Woods

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The intertidal region is made up of the narrow strip of coastline that alternates between being submerged at high tide and exposed at low tide. It’s habitats are some of the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, including rising water temperatures and sea levels.

The two-year project launched with $10 million in state funding earlier this year but kicked into high gear this summer.

Last month, Rouse led a group of dozens of scientists to the tide pools, where they pulled more than 7,000 samples from the area around Bird Rock.

“Anything we could see, we took. But also we took a lot of stuff you can't see back to the lab and had many people on microscopes finding all the tiny creatures,” Rouse said. “Because most of the diversity is actually too small to see.”

Testing is still underway, but so far the samples represent 1,600 species of invertebrates and algae, hundreds of which could be new to science.

Biological library housed in L.A. 

Once collected and analyzed at Scripps, the physical specimens and their DNA profiles will be sent to the L.A. County Museum of Natural History where they will be stored in a massive library.

The museum was chosen in part because it has the largest collection of invertebrates in the U.S., outside of the Smithsonian Institution.

The project will be focused on invertebrates and algae because fish, mammals and other big, visible animals have been sampled plenty. Scientists say there is a major gap in the understanding of the tiny tide pool organisms that play a key role in the wider ecosystem.

“It's all about a food chain … and we don't have a good grounding of who's eating whom,” said Regina Wetzer, curator of marine biodiversity at the Natural History Museum. “It's a whole cascade of networks that feed the larger things that are carnivorous fish or that are birds."

A nudibranch mollusk, a type of sea slug called Vassyeria, was one of the thousands of organisms collected recently in La Jolla. It's seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego

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Among the new species found by the recent tide pool sampling is this polychaete scaleworm, seen here under a microscope.

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Greg Rouse

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Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego

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Protecting the coast

Building this biological library is not just for the sake of expanding scientific understanding. It’s also practical.

Without a clear baseline to reference, said Dean Pentcheff, project manager of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, scientists have been largely operating in the dark.

“To responsibly manage the shore and manage our resources and manage the life on it, we need to know who's where and who's who,” Pentcheff said. “And right now, for the intertidal [zone], we don't know that.”

The DNA library will lay the groundwork for new, powerful tools scientists can use to monitor changes in the tidal ecosystem.

One of those is environmental DNA, or E-DNA, the biological detritus that naturally sloughs off organisms. Collecting samples of water or sand, and the E-DNA in it, can provide a quick snapshot of an ecosystem when compared to a baseline.

At L.A.'s Natural History Museum Regina Wetzer, left, a curator, and Dean Pentcheff, head of the Diversity Initiative for the Southern California Ocean, discuss the logistics of building the tidal "biolibrary."

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“That's a list of all the organisms that are there, but you can't put a name to any of them unless you have a reference library to look it up in,” Pentcheff said. “So our job in this project is to cruise up and down the state and create that library of genetic reference sequences to enable environmental DNA to be used in the future.”

The library will also be designed to allow for different levels of DNA sequencing, from basic DNA profiles, called barcodes, that are quick and easy to produce, to much more complex profiles that provide detailed information on an organism.

Backed by California taxpayers 

The tools the project is expected to unlock have also galvanized the officials in charge of protecting the state’s marine environments.

“Where are invasive species showing up? What's happening with species range shifts as things migrate northward? Those are the kinds of questions that we can answer, start to answer with a lot of this information,” said Mike Esgro, a staff member at the California Ocean Protection Council who leads the agency's work on biodiversity, including Marine Protected Areas.

California’s Marine Protected Areas cover about 16% of California’s coastal waters. They are specific geographical areas in the ocean or around coastal estuaries designed to protect and conserve marine life and habitats.

Esgro hopes the DNA library, and emerging tools like E-DNA that rely on it, will improve how officials manage these places. For example, it could help officials better understand which ones are most vulnerable and identify additional marine environments that need state protection.

It could even help scientists figure out how to shift tidal habitats inland to compensate for rising sea levels.

He also wants to see continued collaboration with state agencies like the Ocean Protection Council and the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

And he hopes the project, which he calls the “Noah’s Ark of intertidal diversity” — and others in California like it focused on insects and fungi — can serve as an example.

“The climate crisis is very real. It's very urgent. We're seeing the impacts right now,” Esgro said. “And so I think adopting that kind of mindset of — ‘We gotta go big; we gotta swing for the fences’ — that's crucial.”

Joseph Babbitt of Springfield, Mo. has a pretty good deal when it comes to health insurance. He works as a senior financial controller for West Plains Veterinary Supply, which employs about 50 people and distributes pet food, toys and vet supplies across the region.

Like about 157 million Americans, Babbitt gets insurance through his job. Unlike most Americans, his job has exceptionally generous benefits. "Our owners are very nice — they give all of our employees healthcare and they pay for it," he says. The company offers several different plan options and covers most or all of the monthly premium cost.

So why, even with free premiums, does it still feel like health costs are way too expensive? "Everybody talks about healthcare and how much it's costing them," says Babbitt. He explains that even without monthly premiums, a high deductible can be brutal — that's the amount the patient has to spend out-of-pocket before the insurance company starts paying for doctors visits and procedures, etc.

Now age 60, he remembers a time when it wasn't so bad. "Back in the '90s, our deductibles were $250 [or] $500 — now they're $5,000," he says. "That seems like a lot."

"We are the only country on our planet that forces people into bankruptcy because they get sick," he adds.

The cost of a new car, every year

Healthcare costs are rising fast in the U.S., and even workers with solid healthcare benefits through work are feeling it, according to an annual survey of nearly 2,000 employers about their health benefits. The report was published Thursday by KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization.

"The average health insurance premium for a family of four is now $28,000, which is just a ton of money," says Matthew Rae, associate director for the Health Care Marketplace Program at KFF. "It's basically the cost of a new car every year just to keep a family of four insured." Of that total for family premiums, workers pay about $7,000 per year on average and employers pay the rest.

A glimmer of positivity is that the costs for plans isn't growing as fast as it has in years past, he explains. "We're seeing a 5% increase in family health insurance premiums, which continues a period of modest growth," he says. That increase is roughly on par with worker wages and inflation.

However, "a 5% increase on a big number is still a lot of money," Rae points out. Plus, the growth for the portion of the premium costs that workers pay was 9%. "If this is the beginning of a shift of costs onto workers, that would be a big deal in terms of affordability," he says.

"We are asking people to chip in a lot of money," Rae adds. "Many people are committing a big chunk of their income to health insurance."

The uninsured rate is rising 

Another report published Thursday demonstrates the way these high costs affect people's health. The survey, conducted every two years by the Commonwealth Fund, a nonprofit foundation that supports independent research, is entitled "The State of Health Insurance Coverage in 2026."

Even for workers fortunate enough to have health benefits, "about 43% of them said that they didn't get healthcare because of cost over the past year, and about 31% reported that they had medical debt," says Sara Collins, lead author of the report.

Another key finding was that the overall uninsured rate rose in the last two years. Collins says that's significant but not surprising, because of federal policy decisions like letting extra federal subsidies for people enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans expire, and people losing Medicaid after the pandemic emergency ended.

Federal data shows millions of people have lost health coverage already from either Medicaid or the ACA marketplaces. When work requirements take effect next year, millions more people are projected to lose Medicaid.

"There is a, I think, a strong feeling across the country that something probably does need to be done to the situation that people are facing in their health and health insurance — both on the cost side and then also on these coverage losses," Collins says.

"We asked people whether the federal government has a responsibility to ensure that all Americans have coverage and nearly three quarters said yes to that — that included about 45% of Republicans, 93% of Democrats and 76% of independents."

Copyright 2026 NPR

Mike Obedoza’s Lumpia Smash Burger begins with the flavorful marinade his mother uses for making lumpia, a crispy Filipino spring roll. He folds it into a beef patty, then tops it with a fried lumpia wrapper, creamy avocado slices and fresh jalapeño.

For Obedoza, who grew up in Carson as the son of Filipino immigrants and now resides in Tustin, the burger is more than a winning recipe. “This is me on a plate,” he said.

Fresh off back-to-back Best Burger wins at the Old Towne Burger Fest in Orange County, Obedoza has landed a residency at Grand Central Market in downtown L.A. as Banger Lumpia.

He attributes his current success to the broader Filipino American food moment happening in Southern California, from Lord Maynard Llera of Kuya Lord winning Best Chef: California at the 2024 James Beard Awards to other Filipino food business upstarts' local success, including San & Wolves in Long Beach.

Mike Obedoza works the griddle, making Filipino-American Smashburger dreams come true.

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Courtesy Banger Lumpia

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“I’m one component of a whole movement that’s happening right now,” he said.

His residency closes this weekend as part of Filipino American History Month, capping off a whirlwind couple of months Obedoza doesn’t take for granted, especially the love he's received from his own community.

“We get a lot of Filipinos that pass by us glowing. … They’re stoked that there’s some Filipino representation,” he said.

Building the burger

Before Banger Lumpia, Obedoza’s pop-up was called Banger, and he folded Filipino flavors like sisig into tacos. Once customers learned the food was Filipino, they kept asking for the classics. “Where’s the lumpia? Where’s the pancit?” he recalled.

Since lumpia filling is marinated ground meat, a burger felt like the natural next step. Obedoza took the marinade from his mother’s lumpia recipe (onions, carrots, soy sauce and fish sauce) and worked it into an all-beef smash patty.

Back-to-back wins: Obedoza’s Lumpia Smashburger took home Best Burger at the Old Towne Burger Fest in 2025 and 2026.

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Jalapeño and avocado add a California finish. “It’s like this perfect blend of being Filipino and Californian,” Obedoza said.

The idea has deep roots in Southern California. Obedoza points to Kogi, the Korean taco truck Roy Choi launched in L.A., which Choi said drew on a kind of local terroir. “I don’t see mustard plants and sheep grazing,” Choi said in a 2014 CNN segment with Anthony Bourdain. “I see barbed wire and telephone poles.”

“It’s a representation of the soil we were raised in," Obedoza said. “I think the Lumpia Smash burger is just my version of that.”

From skater to chef

Growing up in Carson, Obedoza found his creative outlet in rollerblading, competing and filming for sponsors. His favorite skater was Jon Julio, a Filipino American legend of the sport. “That was big for someone, a Filipino growing up in America,” Obedoza said. “I can’t think of anyone else at that time that was a representation of that.”

Obedoza studied hotel and restaurant management at Cal Poly Pomona, where a broken ankle from a skate competition pushed him to get serious about cooking. After graduating in 2007, he completed an accelerated program at the Culinary Institute of America in Greystone in St. Helena. Then, in 2008, he took a trip to the Philippines with his dad that reshaped how he saw himself.

From the skate park to the griddle, Banger Lumpia’s Mike Obedoza puts his whole self on the plate.

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Courtesy Banger Lumpia

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“In the States, I’m Filipino. But when I go there, I’m American,” he said.

Back home, he cooked at hotels including Hyatt and Terranea Resort before moving into marketing and e-commerce. In 2022, he started serving tacos at skate parks under the name Banger. He went full-time in 2023 and has been popping up in L.A. and O.C. ever since.

That same cultural tension carries over into his food. While his Lumpia Smash burger has won praise, Obedoza says some Filipino customers pick apart the more traditional dishes on his menu: the lumpia isn’t made right, they say, the dipping sauce and adobo need more sugar, the adobo isn’t dark enough or has no bone.

“I guess I win on the burgers, but I’ll never win on being Filipino enough,” he said.

He said his cooking reflects his parents’ style and their home region of Central Luzon, north of Manila on the Philippines’ largest island. If it doesn’t match what someone grew up with, he says to get it from their own family.

Despite those differences, Obedoza says that lumpia is “the gateway drug to Filipino food” and hopes that his customers will feel emboldened to try the rest of the menu. He sees the Grand Central Market residency as a test run for an eventual brick-and-mortar. Whatever comes next, he credits one choice: “I went all in on being unique.”

Julia Feinberg feels like she’s living in a sinister version of Groundhog Day. For the second year in a row, California lawmakers have made it tougher for seniors and people with disabilities to qualify for state-funded health benefits.

Feinberg, 37, who has a degenerative neuromuscular disorder, said without Medi-Cal she would be confined to a nursing home rather than living and working as a therapist in Oakland.

“We keep having to have the same fight over and over and over again,” Feinberg said. She requires a power wheelchair and about 19 hours of caregiving each day, which Medi-Cal covers.

California is cutting Medi-Cal after a decade of expansion, part of sweeping federal and state cuts that experts estimate will kick more than 2.2 million Californians off coverage in the next four years, doubling the state’s uninsured rate.

The latest cut came in June, when state leaders approved a budget that will lower the asset limit for low-income seniors and people with disabilities to $21,000 to qualify for Medi-Cal, starting in July 2027. Feinberg, who has built up emergency savings, will have to spend about $10,000 to get under the cap.

In 2024, the state eliminated longstanding Medi-Cal asset limits, but since then lawmakers have chipped away at that policy. At the beginning of this year, state leaders reinstated an asset limit of $130,000, and the June budget lowered it further.

A primary residence and one vehicle are exempt from the new limit, but people 65 and older as well as those with disabilities cannot own a second home or car, and they can’t have more than $21,000 in savings accounts, certain retirement accounts, life insurance policies or even burial plots. They must still meet Medi-Cal income eligibility limits of about $1,800 a month for a single person.

Advocates say the rules unfairly target older people and those with disabilities.

“It’s really expensive to be disabled,” said Elizabette Guéçamburu, 44, who like Feinberg has spinal muscular atrophy and requires a power wheelchair as well as daily caregiving.

Guéçamburu said she’s saving up for a used wheelchair-accessible van, which costs about $75,000. Home modifications such as adding ramps and making bathrooms accessible also cost tens of thousands of dollars, none of which are covered by Medi-Cal. Guéçamburu said those expenses would be impossible to afford if she couldn’t save.

Guéçamburu lives on her family’s farm in Patterson where they grow walnuts, almonds and alfalfa. She works part time as the farm’s bookkeeper. In 2024, doctors diagnosed Guéçamburu’s father with prostate cancer, and he could no longer act as her caregiver. The same year, California eliminated asset limits for people with disabilities and seniors — Guéçamburu cried, able to qualify for Medi-Cal for the first time.

“The timing was a godsend,” she said.

Now, her aging father is unable to take care of her should she lose Medi-Cal, and Guéçamburu is struggling to figure out what to do with money left to her by her grandmother. She’ll likely have to put it into a special needs trust controlled by a family member and give up financial independence. She also had her family strike her from inheriting any portion of their 100-year-old farm. Private home care costs thousands of dollars a month, making it hard for lower- and middle-income people to pay for it out-of-pocket.

“I have to surrender our legacy just to have medical security and have the ability to live my life,” Guéçamburu said.

Asset limit flip-flop

Gov. Gavin Newsom eliminated Medi-Cal asset requirements in 2024 after a yearslong campaign by senior and disability rights advocates. In a statement before the elimination, Newsom said he was proud of the “bold investments” his administration was making to “protect life savings and homes.”

But two years later, faced with a $12 billion budget shortfall, Newsom proposed reinstating the former $2,000 limit, arguing that more than twice as many people enrolled as previously estimated. The Legislature opposed that proposal and compromised at the current higher limit of $130,000, lowering it again to $21,000 starting next July.

Lindsay Imai Hong, California director for Hand In Hand, an advocacy group supporting families that need caregiving, said organizers are looking to the next governor for change.

“We would love to see the asset test permanently taken off of the chopping block,” Imai Hong said.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton said in a statement to CalMatters that he opposes asset limits. He criticized the state for extending other Medi-Cal benefits beyond what it could afford, including coverage for immigrants without legal status.

“Seniors and people with disabilities shouldn’t lose their coverage because they’ve managed to save some money. They’ve done the responsible thing. Why punish them for it?” he said.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate and front-runner Xavier Becerra did not answer specific questions about the asset limit policy, but a campaign spokesperson blamed the Trump administration’s federal cuts for “squeezing” California’s Medi-Cal program.

Becerra will be “focused on protecting access to care and demand savings that are real, measurable and sustainable,” spokesperson Johnathan Underland said. On the campaign trail, Becerra has called himself California’s next “healthcare governor” and has previously floated raising taxes to reverse Medi-Cal cuts, but has not released detailed health policy plans.

Camille Nguyen, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society of San Mateo County, said most people who struggle to stay under the limit have little financial security.

“They have all of their life savings in cash savings instead of a house. That's their retirement. That is the amount they are expecting to live off of for the rest of their life,” Nguyen said.

State data shows about 600 people lost Medi-Cal when California reinstated the $130,000 limit. Advocates expect many more to lose Medi-Cal at the lower limit, but the state never released budget estimates before lawmakers approved the $21,000 limit. If the state reinstated the much lower $2,000 limit, the Department of Finance estimated 62,000 seniors and people with disabilities would lose Medi-Cal over two years.

Limit fuels anxiety, anger among people with disabilities

Feinberg said the prospect of losing Medi-Cal is especially scary because she would also lose access to a special disability program that pays for extra caregiving hours and has a multiyear waitlist. Caregivers help Feinberg get in and out of bed, dress and prepare her meals.

Before the limit was erased in 2024, Feinberg said she checked her bank account every day to make sure the balance was low. At the time, Feinberg was a graduate student and did not earn very much money. Now, as a licensed therapist Feinberg has been able to squirrel away some money.

“I don’t want to spend down that money. I want to save that for retirement, maybe buying a house in the future,” Feinberg said. “The prospect of not being able to have a nest egg is very unsettling.”

Guéçamburu said she’s angry and frustrated that the state views services for people with disabilities as expendable.

“It’s exhausting to have to justify your existence every legislative cycle,” she said.

Supported by the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF), which works to ensure that people have access to the care they need, when they need it, at a price they can afford. Visit www.chcf.org to learn more.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.