Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | S | San Diego Business Journal

County hospitals feeling pinch of charity care: facilities are policing themselves rather than incur regulation from state.

Article Excerpt
Following a statewide survey of California hospitals, executives of several large local facilities have revealed how much they spend on discounts to the poor and how they make up for the expense--or, in some cases, never see the money again.

Some San Diego County hospitals are increasing charity care to the uninsured, although it is unclear from the survey if the same is true of hospitals statewide.

The survey was conducted by the Sacramento-based California Hospital Association to gauge hospital charity care a year after the association issued guidelines to ward off state mandates.

Four local health systems say they were stepping up charity care even before the recommendations, and individually report increases of between 16 percent at UC San Diego Medical Center and more than 70 percent at Sharp HealthCare, which has four hospitals, since 2003.

Scripps Health, one of the area's largest systems with five hospitals, increased 58 percent for the same period.

Sharp and Scripps each spent about $20 million on charity care in 2005.

The cost that hospitals--56 percent of which operate at a loss in California--spend on discounts to the poor or uninsured, translates to higher medical costs or insurance premiums for those who do pay, including businesses, health care administrators readily admit.

Nine of 17 of the area's hospitals in San Diego County reported net losses for 2004, according to...