California’s community safety net hospitals are at stake.
Private Essential Access Community Hospitals (PEACH) recently joined a coalition of California's health care leaders in sending a letter to the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS) outlining actions to stabilize existing programs and predictability of funding sources for hospitals, ensuring critical access to care for all Californians during and after the global coronavirus pandemic.
The group of organizations that signed this letter with us know that the response to COVID-19 has strained our state’s health care system like never before - demanding more out of providers’ clinical, administrative, operational, human and financial resources.
While these immediate demands are putting most hospitals into a financially distressed state, this will pale in comparison to the long-term devastation that COVID-19 will wreak on California’s health care systems and the work that will be required to collectively begin to rebuild.
Some actions DHCS can take to avoid this devastation include:
✅Collect the state’s share of the Hospital Fee Program to be commensurate with the net funding to hospitals
✅Adjust Medi-Cal payments to account for the social complexity of treating an increasing number of homeless individuals
Read the full letter to DHCS here.