Tom-

Please send the following to your email list as continued clarification of Robert Rogers' story:

As in any news story, it is difficult to get all the nuances correct or clear.  To be clear, all the council members in the negotiations care about the hospital and were interested in spending money to support DMC, if the amount and timing of the funds would assure a full service acute care hospital. 

However, as was reported by Robert Rogers, and clarified by Councilmember Butt, neither adequate funding, or timely funding, could have been made available to DMC to preserve our full service acute care hospital in the long term.  DMC has an $18 million dollar annual deficit due primarily to insufficient government reimbursements for Medi-Cal and Medicare patients. These populations make up 80% of our payor mix. Another 10% are uninsured. 

DMC will run out of funding to meet payroll as soon as October 1, which will force the full service hospital to close.  

In addition, the hospital is already not able to operate at full capacity.  Approximately 90 members, or 11%, of our nursing and administrative staff have voluntarily left or indicated that they are leaving DMC due to the financial condition of the hospital. 

The DMC Board has been dedicated to keeping DMC open the past seven years and we are currently doing everything we can to save the Emergency Room and other critical services. The loss of the parcel tax in May, Measure C, helped seal the fate of our full service hospital. It was our last real chance to create a sustainable future for a full service DMC. 

It is easy for everyone to point fingers during this time of crisis for DMC and this community. I believe we can do better than that as a community.  No one individual, company, elected official or anyone else is solely responsible for the fate of DMC. It is a failure of our society as a whole, which has yet to adequately guarantee medical services for our communities' most needy and equally deserving residents. 

Let's focus on what we CAN do right now - save our critically needed emergency room. 

We need to come together for that purpose before we lose that essential and critical service for our community."

Thanks,
Eric Zell
zellandassociates.com