SB 1953 – What Hospitals Can Do in the Face of SB 1953 Mandates and the Capital Crunch
In our latest edition of Perspectives May 2010, we look at:
What Hospitals Can Do in the Face of SB 1953 Mandates and the Capital Crunch
While hospitals play an important role in preserving lives and welfare regardless of a patient’s ability to pay, hospitals themselves are struggling to pay for necessary seismic retrofits and non-structural upgrades to remain in service following a major natural disaster. California’s hospitals are facing unprecedented challenges in meeting Senate Bill 1953’s seismic safety mandates, which require all acute care hospitals to be fully operational after a 500-year earthquake by 2030.
According to a study by the RAND Corporation funded by the California HealthCare Foundation, 50 percent of California’s hospitals face an ultimatum: retrofit and reconstruct or shut down in the next 20 years. Another report by the RAND organization concludes that the cost of meeting the state’s hospital seismic mandate tops out at $110 billion, not including financing costs. The California HealthCare Foundation reports that this comes at a time when more than half of the state’s hospitals already operate in the red.
“At one time SB 1953 posed the single largest financial threat to Catholic HealthCare West, outside of insufficient government reimbursement,” said Wade Rose, Vice President of Public Policy & Advocacy at Catholic HealthCare West, Inc. in San Francisco. “While advances have been made to alleviate some of the pressures hospitals face, we still face the question of what can we afford to do and how long will it take. With the recent disasters in Chile and Haiti, legislators are less likely to make any major changes to this unfunded state mandate.” CHW has already invested $1 billion in retrofits.
Click here to read and view Perspectives. (585 kb pdf )
For a list of hospitals with SPC1 ratings, click here
