After forcing many Yolo County residents to scramble for the last month to find alternative health care providers, Dignity Health and Aetna have reached a new multi-year agreement allowing patients to continue using the services they’ve relied on for years.
“This is a win for our patients who deserve access to high-quality, high-value health care,” Robert Quinn, president of Dignity Health Medical Foundation, stated in a press release. “Our goal in working with Aetna has always been about ensuring we can meet the needs of our patients today and in the future. This agreement ensures we can continue to provide value-driven care for Aetna members.”
Cathy Hughes, Aetna vice president and chief network officer for the Western and South Central region, added that the health insurance company is committed to serving its members “with access to quality, convenient, affordable care through our network of providers.”
“We are pleased to reach an agreement with Dignity Health that enables us to continue working together to meet the health care needs of our members,” Hughes highlighted.
Hughes encouraged Aetna members to call the number on their member card for more information.
This comes after weeks of negotiations that ended in a contract termination in early April that left thousands in “health care limbo” as they were forced to either wait and see if the two organizations could broker a deal or rush to find other solutions.
Bill Findley, 80, was one of these Aetna members who was told earlier this month that he would have to find another health care provider just days after losing his wife, Lynda Findley.
“I don’t want to leave Dignity Health, I mean, I’m 80 years old,” he emphasized in an April 18 interview. “And now I’ve got to look for a different provider. All this stuff piles up and it’s very frustrating. I’ve been with that hospital down there all my life, I was born and raised here.”
Findley worked for and retired from Mobil Chemical, a Woodland plastic plant owned by Exxon Mobil that closed several years ago. He gets his insurance through his retirement plan through Exxon Mobil and was trying to speak to representatives.
“I’m just kind of up in the air,” Findley stressed. “I’ve got congestive heart failure, the start of [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] and now I gotta go look for somebody else to take care of it.”
He’s also reached out to Dignity Health and Aetna but was told that “it’s up to you” with no leads or other options presented.
“I’d like to continue to see my doctors,” Findley asserted. “I’ve established a relationship with them… and I can’t imagine going to somebody that doesn’t know me or has any records or anything like that. I just think it’s like a stab in the back to me. I don’t know what else to say.
“I have enough to worry about without having to worry about this.”
Findley signed continuity of care forms that allowed him to complete upcoming Dignity Health appointments but didn’t know what to do after that.
“I’m working with my daughter,” Findley said, referring to Lori Brooks. “She’s been a lot of help trying to figure out what to do, but you just don’t get any answers out of people. I went to Dignity Health and spoke to a supervisor and she had me more confused than I was when I went in there.
“You know, you work all your life to achieve these things and then this happens.”
Fortunately, Brooks noted in a Friday email that her father is “extremely relieved that this was settled and that he is able to stay with his current doctors.”
“Most of all he’s able to mourn his wife and learn to try to go on without her and not have this hanging over his head,” Brooks emphasized. “He thanks everyone for their encouragement and support.”
However, Aetna was not the only health insurance company that terminated its contract with Dignity Health.
Roughly 17,000 Yolo County Partnership HealthPlan members are still stuck in “health care limbo” with no announcement that the two organizations have resumed negotiations.
Christina Zicklin, director of external communications for Dignity Health, explained in an April 19 email that negotiations had not resumed despite repeated requests from Dignity Health and several Yolo County supervisors.
“In fact, [Partnership HealthPlan of California] has declined to meet with Dignity Health or present a new contract offer since March 31,” Zicklin highlighted.
Quinn added that the refusal of Partnership to engage in meaningful negotiations “places undue burden on our patients jeopardizing their access to essential health care services.”
“It’s imperative that we address this issue promptly to safeguard the well-being of our community members,” Quinn stressed.
Yolo County Supervisor Lucas Frerichs, District 2, said the board has been following this issue closely because Partnership HealthPlan is a nonprofit health insurer that caters to thousands of Medi-Cal patients.
“It’s deeply troubling to learn that we have 17,000 people who are some of our most vulnerable residents in Yolo County being affected by this,” he said in an April 17 interview. “We’ve heard reports from Sutter-Davis, for example, that because of this situation, the emergency department there is being inundated with individuals who don’t have an ability to have a primary care physician.”
He’s also heard reports of people stuck on the phone for hours with Partnership HealthPlan as they try to get set up with a new primary care physician.
Although there are other health care providers in Yolo County such as Communicare, Winters Healthcare and Elica Health Center in West Sacramento, Frerichs argued that it’s unlikely they will have enough capacity to transfer 17,000 people over.
“If people qualify for Medi-cal, they’re probably very low income so they probably have a lot on their plates already,” Frerichs argued. “Having to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out the system and trying to ensure that they have adequate health coverage is completely unfair and puts an undue burden on some of our most vulnerable residents.”
Frerichs believes this all could have been avoided and that both parties should have figured out a solution such as extending a short-term contract for a month or longer while they continued negotiations. The board sent a letter to Dignity Health and Partnership Thursday, April 11 encouraging the two to find a solution.
“We’re basically hearing from them both informally that they’re still actively negotiating but no progress has been made,” Frerichs emphasized.
Additionally, the board sent a letter to the California Health and Human Services Agency in an attempt to get a state-appointed mediator to help broker a deal. Frerichs said he knows the agency has reached out but is not sure if a mediator has been appointed yet.
To read more about this topic, visit dailydemocrat.com/2024/04/09/dignity-health-terminates-contracts-with-two-health-insurers-leaves-patients-in-healthcare-limbo.
