SAN PABLO (KRON) — Officials voted to close the Doctors Medical center, despite a last minute push to save the 60-year-old safety net hospital.
According to board chairman Eric Zell, its a sad day for Contra Costa County residents.
“It’s tragic that in today’s healthcare system that a safety-net hospital that brings services to the poor and to the elderly is being lost at a time when we actually think and hope that we’re providing a better healthcare system to our community,” Zell said. “In the case of west county, that’s clearly not the case.” Zell said
The decision ultimately came down to lack of funds to cover the hospital’s operational costs, despite the fact that Doctors Medical is run extremely efficiently with costs per patient 24 percent lower than other East Bay hospitals, the hospital’s financial advisor, Harold Emahiser, said.
Unfortunately, 90% of the patients at Doctors Medical are either on Medicaid, Medi-Cal, or are uninsured.
“The issue isn’t if the hospital was only run better,” Emahiser said. “It’s not a cost issue. It’s reimbursement. That’s a discouraging thing because there’s no fix found internally, it has to come from outside.”