SEASIDE – The first meeting of the Office of Health Care Affordability to be held outside of Sacramento will be held in Seaside and is to focus partly on the rising costs of health care in three hospitals that serve the Monterey and Salinas areas.
On Wednesday, the OHCA monthly meeting will be held at Embassy Suites by Hilton Monterey Bay Seaside, 1441 Canyon Del Rey Blvd., in the Laguna Grande Ballrooms A and B, from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Item five on the OHCA meeting agenda includes presentations on the variation of health care premiums, spending, and prices across California, public purchaser perspectives, a case study on Monterey County hospitals and state options to address high costs, and the Office of Health Care Affordability statutory authority to address high costs.
Health care advocates, community groups and unions are calling for a low health care spending target for the hospitals serving communities in the Monterey and Salinas areas, according to Health Access and the UC Berkeley Labor Center. This is the first time since the OHCA Board was established in 2022 that it will meet outside Sacramento to better understand the challenges facing a specific community.
Health Access is a nonprofit organization that engages in direct lobbying and advocacy, Health Access California undertakes advocacy towards the goal of quality, affordable, equitable health care for all Californians.
A written comment letter from the UC Berkeley Labor Center submitted to OHCA provides a brief summary of the research and data underlying Monterey County’s affordability crisis.
Founded in 1964, the UC Berekely Labor Center is a public service and outreach program of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
The Labor Center’s health care research program aims to inform policy making related to access to health coverage and health care affordability for workers and their families. It said its review of the available data reinforces the severe health care affordability challenges related to hospital prices in the Monterey and Salinas area, as was summarized in its September 2023 blog post “Why are health care prices so high for workers in Monterey County?”
In its letter to OHCA submitted before Wednesday’s meeting it said in part that Monterey County is a fitting location for OHCA to discuss health care affordability “given the many workers who have shared with the Board their compelling and concerning stories about the health care affordability challenges they face at the three hospitals in Monterey and Salinas: Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP, part of Montage Health), Salinas Valley Health and Natividad.”
Since the first OHCA Board meeting in March 2023, many workers from Monterey County have trekked to Sacramento to describe the struggles they face affording health care in a region with among the highest-priced hospital care in the state, says the Labor Center’s letter. The worker testimonies and the available data demonstrate the extent to which Monterey is an outlier when it comes to high hospital prices, even in a state in which health care affordability problems are widespread.
The UC Berkeley Labor Center letter says that an analysis by Health Care Cost Institute showed that the Salinas metropolitan area, which includes Monterey, had the highest Inpatient prices and the second highest Outpatient hospital prices of any of the metropolitan areas analyzed nationwide in 2021.
According to Health Access, and the UC Berkeley Labor Center, presentations by OHCA staff, Covered California, CalPERS, and a Brown University health economist will include data showing the unusually high prices in Monterey County – some will discuss health care market concentration as a contributing factor.
The OHCA Board meeting presents a vital opportunity for it to begin to play a role in communities struggling with affording care from high-cost outlier entities and/or entire high-cost outlier health care markets, says the letter from the UC Berkeley Labor Center. This month’s meeting will begin the process of exploring the real drivers of health care spending in a data-driven way. It is our hope that in the coming weeks and months, OHCA staff and Board will continue this data-driven analysis and make strategic decisions about how it will measure and enforce statewide spending targets and establish spending targets for high-cost outliers.
To view the meeting agenda and access a link to watch the meeting virtually, go to https://hcai.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/August-2024-OHCA-Board-Meeting-Agenda.pdf
