“For these patients, it costs more for us to care for them than we are repaid by insurance, if we’re paid at all. In fact, insurance payments cover less than half of our budget,” Batchlor said. “This creates a structural deficit — one made worse when the federal government passed massive cuts to Medicaid.”
Batchlor urged the county to study Measure B’s allocation formula, warning that if MLK hospital closes the impact will strain other hospitals in the region.
“Now, emergency departments like ours, and Pacifica, and Catalina are in crisis again. The solution, once again, is to think of this as a system, and the path to making it work is an independent study to make sure that those Measure B dollars that were designed to support our hospitals in crisis are going where they are needed most,” Batchlor said.
Juan Muñoz, a political coordinator with Unite Here Local 11, a hospitality union representing thousands of workers in California and Arizona, told City News Service they entered a partnership with MLK Community Hospital for healthcare.
“We cannot afford to lose that hospital closing its doors, and we think that it’s fair that Measure B be studied, and that we actually look,” Muñoz told CNS. “We got to make sure that taxpayers are getting the most, and we just know that frontline communities need more investment.”