We all hope that we never need the care of a medical trauma center. But if, for example, you’re seriously burned in a house fire today, you’ll be at Valley Medical Center in less than half an hour, getting the state-of-the-art burn care.
Now imagine that the closest place to get that care was Los Angeles.
This is just one way President Donald Trump’s one trillion dollar cut to Medicaid can affect you, regardless of what kind of medical insurance you have.
That’s because MediCal (California’s Medicaid program) is the single largest revenue source for medical care in Santa Clara County. And what happens when a business loses its single largest revenue source?
Trump’s budget will cut about $1 billion from the county’s medical care system and leave an estimated 450,000 people in the county without medical insurance.
“If your number one revenue source is jeopardized in this way, it’s going to have an impact on the viability and availability of access to care for everyone,” said Santa Clara County Executive James Williams, who has been a Paul Revere on this issue for months. When seconds count, all patients — not just Medicaid patients — may end up in overwhelmed emergency rooms, and longer without care.
Valley Medical Center is one of only three major burn units between Los Angeles and the Oregon border, one of two trauma care centers in the county (the other is Stanford), and is number six in the nation for its rehabilitation center. Santa Clara County hospitals handle almost half of all emergency room visits in the county.
Even private hospitals — for example, Kaiser Permanente — send patients to Valley Med because those hospitals don’t have trauma centers.
“[In the county] your nearest burn center is Valley Med,” said Williams. “Your nearest pediatric trauma center is Valley Med. Your nearest trauma center is Valley Med, and so is your nearest rehabilitation center, if you’re recovering from a really serious injury, like a spinal cord injury. In all of those situations, you depend on your public health care system.”
The Medicaid cuts also carry a second whammy.
“Newly uninsured people will find themselves delaying care, leading to more serious and complex health conditions, increasing the use of emergency rooms and more intensive medical services,” Kaiser Permanente said in a statement.
“This will affect all of us as the cost of this uncompensated care leads hospitals and care providers to charge paying customers more to cover their costs. Some hospitals and providers, especially those in rural and underserved areas, will be unable to make up for these unreimbursed costs, and will be financially threatened by these changes.”
This level of cuts is unprecedented, says Williams.
“The cuts will come in pieces over the next few years, but it’s facing a loss of a billion dollars in revenue,” said Williams. “So it’s going to be significant. It’s going to require all hands on deck to do everything that we can to try to mitigate as much of that as possible.
“We’re going to have to step forward as a community and figure out how we preserve some of the things that make this place so special,” he continued.
But preserving Santa Clara County’s first-rate medical care system will come at the cost of cuts to other county programs and social services, said Williams.
“We have tremendous wealth in our community,” said Williams. “We also have really excellent health outcomes. One of the reasons we’re a very healthy, vibrant community is that we have access to care. These are things that make this place special and a place we’ve chosen to live. We can’t take that for granted as a community.”
For more on the Medicaid cuts’ impact on Santa Clara County, visit tinyurl.com/scc-medicaid-cuts-impact.
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