From The Other Side:

Have you given any thought to the direction California’s public health system has taken? Are you aware of the problems facing our hospitals throughout the state? If you are like the majority of us, your concerns become real when you enter an emergency room or your doctor tells you “there’s something wrong here and we need to treat it.”

It is then that the hospital becomes one of the most important facilities around; it even upstages your home.

This is the time when you begin to ask questions: Is it safe here? Is this hospital up to date? Does it have the right kind of people and staffing? Am I going to be all right?

Pretty scary, isn’t it? Lots of anxious questions, and just to give you some insight, the answers could be disturbing.

I have a unique position as it relates to hospitals. I chair the Verdugo Hills Hospital board of directors, I have been a member of the board for the past seven years, and as a board member I have access to the studies and projections relating to hospitals in this state and what portends for their future.

The picture isn’t comforting, and unless dramatic steps are taken to make significant changes, we will, by the year 2015, have a far more severe medical crisis in this state than we have now.

A June study titled “The Financial Health of California Hospitals,” prepared by Price Waterhouse Cooper for the California Health Care Foundation, is thought-provoking. Included in the report are some facts:

 Nearly half of California’s 450 community hospitals operate in the red.

 More than 70 hospitals and emergency rooms in California have closed in the past 10 years.

 California Community Hospitals have 6,000 fewer beds than 10 years ago in spite of the fact that our population continues to grow and age.

 California has the largest uninsured population in the nation at 6.8 million; this is larger than the population of the state of Massachusetts.

One of the most interesting facts is that California hospitals provided a total of $8.6 billion in medical care that was uncompensated (charity care) in 2006, principally due to the under-funding of government programs. California ranks last in the nation for Medi-Cal (Medicaid) reimbursement.

After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, the California Legislature passed a compliance law requiring California hospitals to meet seismic safety standards. Compliance has now been extended to the year 2013.