PHOENIX — A new state report shows hospitals in Arizona growing profits, except for behavioral health hospitals and long-term care hospitals.
Behavioral health hospitals, serving some of the most vulnerable in the state, are financially unhealthy themselves, carrying more uncompensated medical care than the year before.
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Deborah Geesling is an advocate and a mom to a son with a serious mental illness and is familiar with how difficult it is to get care in a behavioral health hospital in Arizona.
"It's just a very difficult process, if there's that, that shortage of beds, and then once they get a bed, oftentimes they don't keep them long enough," Geesling said.
The new state report shows the behavioral health hospitals are carrying nearly double the amount of uncompensated medical care than the year before.
"It's a strain on the system and also is an indication that perhaps those patients are not getting the care that they need earlier on in their in their diagnosis," Ann-Marie Alameddin, President and CEO of the Arizona Hospital and Healthcare Association, said.
Alameddin points to the report showing operating margins across all of the hospitals in the state at about a six percent operating margin. That's what Alameddin said is 'healthy' that can be reinvested.
However, behavioral health hospitals have an unhealthy operating margin at less than one percent.
"I think the behavioral health care system in Arizona is fragile right now, and I think there's a lot of stressors on that system, and I think it's important to say that, you know, it's a part reflective of the of the patient population that is also a fragile and very important community that we need to continue to meet the needs of," Alameddin said.
As for why, Alameddin, points to the hundreds of thousands of fewer Arizonans enrolled in Medicaid following the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency, as part of the reason.
"It's a fragile system that we have to make sure that we're strengthening and uncompensated core care or ensuring that patients have access to affordable health care insurance is the first step," Alameddin said.
It's a system that needs change, Geesling said, to serve the most vulnerable.
"There's all of these barriers that make it so difficult to and because they're more costly, there's just that, you know, we just tend to play hot potato," Geesling said. "It's just passing them off quickly between each one, and then, you know, if they end up in the streets, because, you know, the time ran out. Well, 'Oh well, we tried, we did our best.'"
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