Supervisor Greg Cox Responds to Healthcare Safety Net Board Item

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SAN DIEGO, CA – What we saw today was the result of many months of staff work and community participation on the critical issue of healthcare facing every area of every county in every state in this country.

The Medi-Care program and Medi-caid program (Medi-Cal in California) are supposed to be the health safety net for most indigent Americans. Unfortunately, as those programs are administered now, they don’t begin to do the job in terms of affordable accessible health care for all individuals and families who need it. They completely ignore the entire category of medically indigent adults. In California, we have a more severe problem because we have higher percentages of people who are uninsured. In San Diego County, the problem gets even worse because we are under-funded by the state and federal government, relative to Los Angeles and the large urban counties in the Bay area.

The recent announcement that UCSD plans to move it’s hospital from Hillcrest to La Jolla and Paradise Valley Hospital’s announcement that it is selling its facility to a for-profit company, has the potential to dramatically change the health safety net for the South and Central regions of our county, and not for the better. Prime Healthcare has announced that it plans to close as many as 100 beds at Paradise Valley, should they acquire the hospital. Capacity in these regions is already at a premium and with the system already fragile and weak, we cannot afford to loose the essential beds and services that we have in our community today.

The Healthcare Assessment that was commissioned by this Board and the Healthcare Safety Net Action Plan developed by our experts in the Health and Human Services Agency are giving us a reality check on what needs to be done and what realistically can be done to deal with a difficult situation affecting thousands of San Diegans.

Indigent health is a core function of the County. I absolutely and unequivocally support the recommendations in the recommendations by the Health and Human Services Agency that came before the Board today. Having our partners in healthcare who deal with this issue every day help us come up with the best way to leverage a $5M infusion of one-time funds to shore up the Health Safety Net, is one of the best expenditures made by this Board all year. I only wish we had the sort of resources available to other large urban counties so that we could do more.

By working closely with our healthcare providers, we’ll have to use our good faith partnering and creativity to make up for what material resources are not available. We also need to aggressively move together to get what we in San Diego County need from Sacramento and Washington at a time when every American is realizing we are dealing with a health care melt down.

Taking action today begins this effort.