0920_September Comstock's Magazine September 2020 | Page 44

HEALTH CARE
Daniel Wolcott, president of Adventist
Health Lodi Memorial hospital and
president and CEO of Dameron
Hospital, oversees the latter’s
transition to possibly being taken over
by Roseville-based Adventist Health.
this story either declined to speak or
didn’t respond to requests for comment.
One of those, Doctors Hospital of Manteca,
is a 73-bed facility in San Joaquin
County. It lost $11 million in 2018, the
latest year for which data are available.
Two others — 111-bed Barton Memorial
Hospital in South Lake Tahoe and
152-bed San Joaquin General in French
Camp — posted solid income gains for
2016, 2017 and 2018. No state data are
available for 50-bed NorthBay VacaValley
Hospital in Vacaville.
As bad as the financial impacts
have been in the first months of the
pandemic, the long term could be
worse. “The timeline is even more
scary than you might think,” says
Orlov. The summer case spike wasn’t
the much-feared second wave but the
second peak of the first wave. When
infection rates dropped in May and
June, getting people to come back to
the hospital for elective surgeries went
slower than hoped, he says. So if a
second wave hits and elective surgeries
have to be curtailed again, “when do
(hospitals) get a break? I am becoming
skeptical — and I don’t have data to
support it — I am becoming skeptical
that even a year from now that we’re
going to see a return to historical levels
of hospital and physician utilization.”
Then there’s the problem of more
patients who can’t pay. An April 3
analysis by consulting firm Health
Management Associates reported that
in an unemployment scenario in the
midrange of projections — 17.5 percent
— the number of California’s uninsured
would grow by almost 200,000. Nationally,
hospitals’ bad debt and charity
care in March 2020 increased 13 percent
over March 2019 and are expected
to rise further, according to an April
Kaufman Hall report.
The long-term outlook
Even if small independent hospitals
don’t close, they have tough decisions
that will likely mean cutting services.
Wipfli’s Johnson says they’ll need to
figure out which service lines to keep
and which to cut because their margins
are low or negative. Subspecialties like
orthopedics or physical therapy might
get axed, he says.
More hospitals with cratering
revenues also means that area businesses
may need to budget for higher
insurance costs next year: Hospitals
and other providers could pass along
some of their losses to private insurers.
In March, Covered California warned
that a lack of federal help could mean
40-percent hikes in insurance rates in
the individual and employer markets
next year. In June, a UC Berkeley
School of Public Health study showed
that the pandemic had cost California
insurers about $2.4 billion for testing
and treatment, six times the annual
cost to treat the seasonal flu. Only two
companies filed requests for health
insurance rate changes with the state’s
Department of Insurance between
April and June. On June 1, Health Net
requested a 4.1-percent annual average
44 comstocksmag.com | September 2020