Discussion of CPMC and SF’s Healthcare Power Struggle

Please come to a discussion of
CPMC and SF’s Healthcare Power Struggle:
and a discussion of strategies for the upcoming
Supervisor’s hearing on CPMC’s planned expansion.

Saturday, November 17, 1-3 PM
SF Gray Panthers Office
1182 Market St., Room 203
Near Hyde St. and 8th St. Civic Center BART/Metro
(One door downtown from Orpheum Theater)

We will be replaying and discussing City Healthcare Purchaser Catherine Dodd’s testimony at a SF Supervisor’s hearing on how CPMC’s expansion plans would give Sutter-CPMC a dominance in the healthcare marketplace that would allow it to significantly raise its prices, and give other healthcare providers an opportunity to raise their prices also. Sutter’s dominance of other Northern California healthcare markets has raised Northern California hospital revenues per patient per day to be 56% above those in Southern California. (LA Times, 3-6-2011)

Catherine Dodd’s testimony gives a riveting picture of a developing power struggle between two SF healthcare blocs of Accountable Care Organizations, groupings of hospitals, doctor groups, and insurance companies:

1) CPMC hospitals and clinics, paired with Brown and Tolland doctors group, and Blue Cross health insurance, versus

2) UCSF and Dignity hospitals and clinics, paired with Hill doctors group, and HealthNet insurance.

Accountable Care Organizations, mandated by the Obama Health Plan, are supposed to reduce healthcare prices by consolidating provision of healthcare, but the case of Sutter shows that this consolidation can also raise prices. Meanwhile, patients in each bloc suffer because it is difficult and expensive to see doctors in the competing bloc.

Understanding these dynamics should give us a better strategy in dealing with CPMC’s plans, when they come up at the Supervisor’s hearings.

Please join us to untangle and discuss this complicated struggle. Clearly, trying to use market mechanisms to streamline healthcare and reduce healthcare costs leads to a machine that tears itself apart. We need a healthcare system not based on profit.