Bill Findley is 80 years old, recently lost his wife and found out he would have to find a new healthcare provider after Dignity Health and Aetna terminated their contract earlier this month.
“I don’t want to leave Dignity Health,” he emphasized. “And now I’ve got to look for a different provider. I just lost my wife and 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 Mobile that closed several years ago. He gets his insurance through his retirement plan through Exxon Mobile and has been trying to speak to representatives, but he hasn’t gotten a hold of them.
“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 has signed continuity of care forms to be allowed to complete some upcoming Dignity Health appointments but he doesn’t know what to do after that.
Julia Findley, his sister-in-law, said his only other option would be Kaiser meaning he’d have to travel to Sacramento or Vacaville for appointments, which is something she said is not possible because he cannot drive.
“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 work all your life to achieve these things and then this happens.”
Findley is one of thousands of Yolo County residents scrambling to find new healthcare providers after Dignity Health terminated its contract with two large health insurers, Aetna and Partnership HealthPlan.
The decisions came after weeks of negotiations regarding reimbursement rates.
To learn more about Dignity Health and Aetna, visit dignityhealth.org/aetna.
Yolo County Board Supervisor Lucas Frerichs, District 2, said the board has been following this issue closely, particularly the contract termination with nonprofit health insurer Partnership HealthPlan, which 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 referring only to Partnership HealthPlan members. “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 healthcare providers in Yolo County such as Communicare, Winters Health Care 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 avoidable 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. That’s why 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.
